Zapata photo shrouded in mystery
For years it was thought that German-born Hugo Brehme took the famous shot of the Mexican revolutionary with crisscrossed bandoleers. But technology has pointed historians in another direction.
By Ken Ellingwood
“It’s an emblematic image in the history of Mexico,” says Mayra Mendoza, deputy director of the government’s photographic collection in the central state of Hidalgo. “Who gave us this photo?” (Associated Press) |
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Reporting from Pachuca, Mexico – The famous rebel poses in full regalia, his right hand gripping an Old West carbine, his left steadying a sword that dangles from the waist. You recognize the bushy mustache, broad sombrero, crisscrossed bandoleers.
It’s an icon of Mexican history: a black-and-white photograph of Emiliano Zapata believed taken in 1911, a year after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
Published in a Mexican newspaper two years later and reproduced since then in history textbooks and on postcards, T-shirts and shopping bags, the Zapata image is almost as famous as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
With so much exposure, you’d think the photograph had little left to reveal to the world. Yet an intriguing question hovers: Who took the picture?