Photo Museum Cuatro Caminos, Naucalpan de Juárez, Mexico

The Photo Museum Cuatro Caminos (Spanish: Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos) is one of the projects that make up the Pedro Meyer Foundation. We believe that a more effective use and a better understanding of the visual language strengthen the community dialogue and offer the tools for a greater social and economic projection of the individuals. For this reason, our objective is to consolidate an educational ecosystem that, through various resources, meets this training need among different audiences and levels of specialization.

The Cuatro Caminos Museum Photo is a project of the Pedro Meyer Foundation. It is a museum dedicated to the exhibition, diffusion, and analysis of photography.

It is an international meeting that recovers the initiative of a group of Mexican photographers in the 70s and 80s, when the first photography colloquia were held, whose purpose was to generate spaces for discussion and encounter between different Latin countries, around photographic production of the moment.

The project began in early 2012 in what was previously an industrial warehouse that housed a plastics factory in the 1940s. Funding for its realization was obtained through funds from the Pedro Meyer Foundation and the financial support provided by The National Council for Culture and the Arts The remodeling of the old space was in charge of the architect Mauricio Rocha Iturbide3 and was inaugurated on September 5, 2015.

Asked about the birth of the project, the museum director Guadalupe Lara mentioned:

“It was two and a half years ago, when we came to see the property and saw all the possibilities that it had. As you know Pedro is very restless and he had already founded the Pedro Meyer Foundation in 2007, that is, he already has a job done at the Coyoacán headquarters. There we have workshops, online education, events and more, but we wanted to expand this same possibility to an area of the city where there is nothing and that is growing commercially in an exponential way like the Toreo Shopping Plaza and in the other corner the Mexipuerto that It will also be a commercial area and the whereabouts will be renewed. We are in the middle, we did a study and we realized that we have 3 million inhabitants around where almost 60 percent are young people with very little cultural offer. ”

The museum is located north of Mexico City on the street of Ingenieros Militares 77, in the municipality of Naucalpan de Juárez.

The space has more than 5000 m2 of construction, including three galleries for exhibition, auditorium for 150 people, 4 classrooms for educational activities, cafeteria, shop, restaurant and terrace open to the public.

The Cuatro Caminos Museum Photo is located at the northwest of Mexico City, 15 minutes from the Polanco – Chapultepec circuit and 20 minutes from the Historic Center.

We are part of a new cultural axis that is located in one of the zones of greater economic transformation in the limits of the State of Mexico and the Mexican capital, expanding the offer and cultural coverage for thousands of inhabitants in the metropolitan area.

The appearance of this Museum Four Roads Pedro Meyer comes to fill a space in two senses: it is the first large institution dedicated to photography created in our country after the Center of the Image and comes to occupy a geographical place where there are practically no cultural spaces . In that sense, once again, we will be working closely with the authorities of Mexico City.

The museum was inaugurated with two exhibitions curated by Francisco Mata Rosas, Gerardo Montiel Klint and Gustavo Prado. The show Todo para ver brought together representative works of Mexican photography from the last 15 years, and the exhibition The State of Things was aimed at making violence visible.

It is not an anthology of Mexican photography, it does not pretend to be a recount or a conclusion about the production of photographic images in this century, rather it is a set of ideas that before giving answers or certainties raises questions about what is current Mexican photography .

The curators, Francisco Mata and Gerardo Montiel Klint, propose a series of apparently unrelated images that force us to reflect on this unsolvable question, given that there is no Mexican photography, there are many and all are in redefinition and construction, rather than a Curatorial proposal is an invitation to confront the different views, establish connections, generate questions and dialogues.

Different interpretations, reactions and positions in the climate of violence that exists in the country. This is not pornography of death or a mass grave. Neither is a complaint more. The state of affairs seeks to combat the indifference of the people. The exhibition zamarrea because it is dedicated to the thousands who have killed or disappeared during these years in which impunity has increased.

In 2016 and with the curatorship of Gustavo Prado, the first fashion photography exhibition was held in the museum. It was selected by the Google Art Institute as part of its project “We wear Culture” as part of its exhibits with planetary museums such as the Met and the Louvre.