Óscar and His Taxi

From the series Windows 2009, March 2009. All images courtesy the artist, who wishes to express great gratitude to the town and photo library of Nuevo León

Óscar Fernando Gómez lives in Monterrey, Mexico. For fifteen years he worked as a photographer of weddings and quinceaños celebrations. Going from job to job, he found he was spending a lot of time in taxis, and so, in 2005, he decided to supplement his income by renting a green Nissan Tsuru and becoming a taxi driver himself. The taxi gave Gómez the window — quite literally — to make photographs in his time between paying customers. One day he hopes to buy his own cab; maybe if enough people like his photographs, he will be able to do it.

A few years ago, when he found out that he was going to be a father, Gómez decided he wanted to create an album of urban images to show his daughter eventually. Sadly, his baby did not survive — “From one day to the next, everything was over,” he says. But Gómez continued to shoot his urban album.

Here, a selection of those images is shown in a grid: the repetition of the window-frame becomes almost hypnotic, and the simple typology of images seems to just sing off the page. The photographs are of typical Monterrey street scenes: men pushing wheelbarrows full of junk, an abandoned couch, two large tractor tires just standing there, apparently abandoned. The vehicle’s window works to energize the scene in front of us, as if reality becomes more intense when it is framed so perfectly. The meaning of this place seems to build up when we view a grid of these photographs. All these delicious, small details are both trivial and enormous at the same time. 

Thank God Gómez did not attend photography school, and is not involved with contemporary photographic practice. There is a refreshing sense of discovery in his work that allows him to convert small details into images of monumental stature. 

When I met Gómez earlier this year in Mexico, he seemed to me to have the uncertain exhilaration of a kid who has just discovered how to ride a bike: he knew he was onto something but didn’t quite understand what it was. Looking through these images, riding in Gómez’s taxi through the urban jungle of modern Monterrey, gives us a similar sense of exhilaration. It reminds me of that excitement of arriving in a new country, where everything is so fresh and intense . . . just like that first ride from the airport in a taxi.