MEXICO: Royal Family

A public event in Mexico can hardly be called official until there has been a scuffle between the camera-toting Casasolas. Members of Mexico’s royal family of photography have been fighting among themselves ever since Grandfather Agustín turned picture-taker 70 years ago. Says smiling Grandmother Doña Refugio: “My husband Agustín taught them to fight for their pictures, and that’s the way it should be. And anyway, we are all united in the big projects.”

Every Sunday, as many as 30 Casasolas gather at Doña Refugio’s big table in suburban Mixcoac to criticize the week’s output and argue sports and politics. This week they could take time out from table talk to toast a monument to family unity: Volume 22 of the Casasola Graphic History of the Revolution, 1910-1940. Into its making had gone some of the choicest pictures that three generations of Casasolas had contributed to the family archives (no Casasola uses the word “files”).

Faces for the Record. What Mathew Brady was to the U.S. Civil War, Agustín Casasola, his sons and his brother Miguel have been to the Mexican Revolution. They photographed the stormy leaders of the first upheaval—Madero, Villa, the peasant leader Zapata from Morelos, Huerta, Carranza and many another. Lugging their heavy, old-fashioned cameras, the Casasolas hustled into the field to record fighting between the opposing forces and to catch the faces of the women, soldaderas, who traveled with the armies and often fought beside their men.

Agustín’s son Gustavo went off with Villa’s army. “I could never look into Villa’s eyes,” Gustavo recalls. “They were like tiger’s eyes.” Brother Miguel followed Obregón, who liked to stay up talking until 4 in the morning. “He’d never drink himself, but he’d feed us coffee and cognac, talk about fighting ahead or swap the latest filthy stories.” Because the campesino’s hero, Emiliano Zapata, refused to let Agustín and other newsmen cover his ragged army, and shot up their press train, Agustín sprinted to Vera Cruz to cover the U.S. invasion. Both sides held their fire while he focused under his photographer’s black cloth.

Back in Mexico City, Agustín and Gustavo finally cornered Zapata as he and Villa lounged side by side in the Presidential Palace. Villa growled, “The air in here is getting cold with photographers.” The Casasolas scrambled outside for a long (and safer) shot at the banquet Villa was giving Zapata, noted that the suspicious Zapata never ate a mouthful.

Seeds for the Future. Gustavo now spends his time editing the History, handling the many orders ($1,400 a month) for pictures from the archives. Sometimes Muralist Diego Rivera comes to study revolutionary faces. Pictures that go into the files today, says Gustavo, show “fewer hangings and battles and more construction projects and dedications. . . . We are coming to years when the fruits of the Mexican Revolution are being gathered, maybe not exactly the same fruits the revolutionists thought they were planting, but fruits that Mexicans should see and remember, for they will furnish the seeds of future harvests.”