Antonio Turok

(1959 Ciudad de México. México)

The Mexican-born son of foreigners, Antonio Turok studied under the renowned photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo and later in several workshops in the United States. In the mid-1970s the anthropological work his sister Martha Turok was doing led him to settle in Chiapas where he could work with the ethnographer Gertrude Duby Blom.

It was in San Cristóbal de las Casas and the Chiapas highlands where he started to photograph the “beauty that surrounded him,” he tells us. However, as he matured, he took on a more profound conception of documentary photography and joined the photography agency Imagenlatina, which was headquartered in Mexico City and distributed material for Mexican and international communications media.

His profession took him to Central America in the 1980s to photograph armed conflicts there. He returned to Mexico and documented the conflicts of 1994 and 2006. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts for photography in 1996. He has given numerous lectures at universities and workshops in the United Sates and as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. He lives and teaches in Oaxaca and continues to document the human condition.