The Museum of Photography displays and publishes a small sample of the photographic heritage safeguarded by the National Photograph Library for the purposes of research, education and dissemination.

The museum seeks to engage and provoke reflection on the collections of the National Photograph Library and photographic work in Mexico with its five core exhibition themes: portraiture, eye-witness pictures, scenes from everyday life, landscapes and visual essays. It aims to respond to the new challenges posed by today’s public. Image and memory is a synergy which came into being with the invention of photography.

The museum emphasizes a new interpretation using sets of images, which appear together in the works of authors of various periods, from the origins of photography up to the present day. These originals give us a glimpse into the differences in how a subject is treated over time, and bring the viewer close to the work of photographers and genres avoided by traditional histories of photography.

As a communication strategy, the dialogue viewers have with the image has the benefit of telling us how the perspective of the photographer changes over time and between generations. Through this process the perceptions we hold about what is being communicated can enrich, confirm, reaffirm and even contradict our knowledge of the development of society and the way it works.

A clear example of this is the Casasola Archive, whose place in the collective imagination has led it to be identified as a part of national identity, although in the light of research, we can see for example that the iconic “Adelitas in the wagon” were not female soldiers of the revolution, but were in reality women who sold provisions to the federal soldiers at the Buenavista train station.

Other examples are the perspective of Guillermo Kahlo, the German photographer who settled in Mexico, and who with technical rigor presented perfectly made pictures of temples, or the playful gaze of Nacho López, in his visual essay “La Venus se va de juerga” (Venus goes out on the town), showing how bystanders reacted to a mannequin in different situations.

In this way image and memory at the Museum of Photography seek to build social cohesion, and to that extent they serve to divulge a way of being, thinking and creating.

The images from the National Photograph Library on show in the Museum of Photography enrich the culture of photography and the dialogue between them and their viewers, and with all their peculiarities they also tend to promote new ways of seeing, creating, enjoying and documenting.