“I think it’s curious that people see these images as cheerful, because, to me, they’re very sad,” the Zapotec photographer Luvia Lazo said. “My loss is still recent. These photos still hurt to make.”
Luvia Lazo’s great-grandfather, Domingo, had already lost the vision in one eye when the other began to fail him. “Luvia,” he said to her one day, “”—I am losing your face, in the local Zapotec language. The word took on a sharp poignancy for her when he passed away, in April, 2021; it echoed in her mind along with the thought that it was his countenance, now, that had vanished.
Several months before Domingo took a fall from which he never recovered, Lazo had received a government grant to produce a photo series on women and Indigenous identity. “But I was destroyed after he died,” she said. “I couldn’t make portraits of women, or think about representation.” Grief transformed the world around her, rendering the familiar unintelligible and labyrinthine. Lazo navigated her mourning as most do: intuitively, inexpertly, groping in the dark.
At the market in Teotitlán del Valle, a town known mainly for its wool textiles, Lazo began approaching elder artisans who were selling their products. She would ask them about their grandchildren, tell them about her recent loss, and photograph them. The images are all variations on a simple concept: bodies that don’t reveal their faces, either covering them with the items they hold or turning their backs toward the camera.
Although grief is a universal experience, Lazo recognizes an ethnographic value in “Kanitlow.” Placing certain photos side by side, she noticed that some of her subjects wore jeans and T-shirts, while others dressed in traditional garb. It’s all part of the story she wanted to tell. “Things vanish because everything undergoes transformations—life, but also cultures,” she said. Negotiating one’s heritage is a practice with which Lazo is intimately familiar.