A tender portrait of life and ritual from Mexico City’s streets
Órale — For the last six years of his life, photographer, collector and designer Michel Hurst documented death rituals, street life and religious pageantry in contemporary Mexico. A new monograph showcases his work.
Black News 
Órale — For the last six years of his life, photographer, collector and designer Michel Hurst documented death rituals, street life and religious pageantry in contemporary Mexico. A new monograph showcases his work.
Folk deity Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, Our Lady of Holy Death, resembles the skeletal remains of the Virgin Mary. Her worshippers, who offer tequila and marijuana smoke in place of votive candles and incense, are often the dispossessed – migrants, LGBTQ+ people, and street children. Death and Santa Muerte do not discriminate.
For three years on the Santa Muerte Feast Day, held on Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), late photographer Michel Hurst documented devotees in Tepito, a neighbourhood in Mexico City. His subjects, staring fixedly into the lens, tell the story of the processions: men tenderly propping up icons in their arms; children with faces painted to resemble chalky skulls; a man cradling his baby with a hand tattooed with the wide, violent grin of the Joker. Throughout his pictures of cults, passion plays and street life, a juxtaposition exists; skin against concrete, softness against rigidity.
In Órale: Love and Death in Mexico City, rituals around death and degradation are connected in parallel to moments of love and tenderness, painting a visceral portrait of a city narrated through its people. This love is evident throughout the photographs, and equally through the book itself, which Hurst’s partner of 43 years, Robert Swope, embarked upon creating after Hurst’s passing in 2023.
The rituals Hurst records reflect attitudes toward mortality that have shaped Mexican national identity since the Aztecs. In Mexico, death is understood as a continuation of life, celebrated with joy and humour. One of Hurst’s photographs from Tepito shows Santa Muerte, scythe in hand, draped in a kitsch hooded shroud composed entirely of dollar bills. Yet, the rising popularity of the folk religion also reveals a growing feeling of discontent with a country that continues to experience some of the highest rates of violence in the world. Those who pray to the Lady of Death pray for protection, strength and justice.
Hurst’s images from Tepito run side-by-side with photos depicting Catholic pageantry, revealing how deeply Catholicism continues to frame Mexican life despite declining numbers of worshippers. Although the Catholic Church condemns reverence for Santa Muerte, it shares a similar familiarity with death and suffering. Reenactments of Christ’s Crucifixion in Taxco echo the same ritualised confrontation with the macabre. Hurst portrays a country where spiritual rituals remain deeply embedded within daily life, regardless of the form these beliefs take.
Though much of Órale is concerned with death, Swope says that it was Hurst’s deep, profound love of people that shaped his entire photographic approach. His particular skill for creating instant connection, an intimacy that could disarm strangers into revealing deep personal truths over a drink in a bar, meant people on the streets of Mexico City would open up and allow him to show them as they wanted to be seen. “That really is what his photography was about. Seeing these people, making that connection, photographing them, and then moving on. It’s like a 30-second love story,” Swope explains. “There’s some kind of mysterious connection between the subject and the photographer, this covenant between the two.”
“He would never steal a photograph. He wanted your participation, so he was always close,” Swope adds. “If you look at the photographs in the book, you can tell how close he was with all of these pictures.” The results are portraits that reflect an instant moment of connection with the camera, pictures that are intimate and sincere, never voyeuristic.
At 67, Hurst was able to devote himself entirely to his first love of photography when the couple retired to Mexico City. Before their move, Swope and Hurst had run the legendary design gallery in New York City, Full House, for almost 30 years. In the early 2000s, they found a collection of photos from a 1960s Catskills retreat for transgender and gender-nonconforming people at a flea market, subsequently published in what would become the cult photography book, Casa Susanna. Hurst’s hawkseye as a collector gave him a similarly perceptive eye for the perfect shot – not a single picture he took was cropped.
But Hurst was always a voracious observer, taking pictures throughout his life. Wherever the couple travelled, Hurst would document it – Cuba, Nashville, Guatemala, Morocco. In Pennsylvania, he produced a whole series of photographs of G.I. Joe dolls participating in hardcore gay sex. There are thousands more photographs by Hurst that Swope wants to see published.
“He was someone who constantly was looking, observing, watching. He was feasting on the world, on the beauty of the world, the beauty of people,” Swope says. But people remain the throughline of his photographs, from Mexico City to Pennsylvania: “For him, pictures without people were sort of dead.”
Órale: Love and Death in Mexico City by Michel Hurst is published by Hunters Point Press.
Roxana Diba is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.
Buy your copy of Huck 83 here.
Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.
Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.
