In Youth Is Pressure
2018 - 2022.

Soon after arriving in Morelia Michoacán on a sunny afternoon of October 2017, my gaze was caught by the cunning eyes of a young woman called Sofia, and an inestimable friendship (the kind that uses little words to communicate) began. Six months later she would leave her parents home and settle in Berlin. I happened to be in that city, at the end of a long self-imposed exile, and on my way back home to Mexico. I found the timing relevant and proposed to do her portrait. She accepted, and without either of us knowing it, so began what would become the group of photographs here presented. On December of that same year, a friend in common would contact me saying that she had seen the portrait and if I would consider doing her own. She also had just moved back to Mexico, at a threshold facing a daunting future of global warming, C-19 pandemics, and a growing authoritarianism. This existential anxiety set the tone, and naturally became the topic of conversation with most of the Mexican women here portrayed.
But dare I look? As a heterosexual middle-aged, white man working in the #MeToo era, photographing young women in a dignified way is not only a challenge, but a way to defy puritanical blindness and exercise my freedom to look at whatever I choose to. In the age of extinction we are living in, this is the chronicle of an important moment in the life of a generation, relevant for the potential futures reflected on their eyes.

M.Guillén Tlalpan Mexico April 2022.