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The photographer Mayan Toledano didn’t expect to make a second home for herself when she started visiting Mexico City. But she felt at ease there, and started going several times a year. “Suddenly I had people, friends there. Suddenly I had a mini life somewhere else,” she tells me earlier this fall. Whenever she left, she felt the urge to return: “I need to come back and water these new flowers in my life.”
That sense of community is reflected in Mayan Toledano: No Mames, out this month from Damiani, the result of the careful edit of some 10,000 photos. For this, Toledano got an assist from Vogue alum Samantha Adler—whom Toledano credits with some of her earliest opportunities to take her work from Instagram to more established venues (like this magazine). “By the time I realized it was a book, I was too overwhelmed to sequence it by myself,” Toledano says. “But bringing someone in with an eye that I trust, we were able to tell the story in a rhythm that gives space to each character. We are going in and out of people’s homes and their exterior lives. So overall, I think the book has a kind of a music that is the music of the city.”
Toledano approaches her work with a naturalistic attitude. Whether she is capturing Holocaust survivors in New York’s outer boroughs or Ukrainian dance students gathered in Manhattan, her goal is to capture her subjects as they are. “I don’t really like to lay a lot of expectations on the subjects,” she tells me, and that extended to her varied portraits of queer life in Mexico City. “I try to leave space for them to be who they are and what they are willing to show me. How do you see yourself today? If this is a bad day for you, if it is a confident day for you, that will be in the photo.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also celebration and artifice. The title phrase “no mames” is an exclamation of disbelief and appreciation—kind of like a cheeky, “Wow, oh, my God!” Toledano describes an impromptu fashion show in someone’s home: “We were sitting down to take the photos, but everything was always in movement and there was always something happening. I remember everyone that day just kept going, no mames. And I remember that sound over and over and over again.”
Toledano and I looked at a few of her favorite pictures from the book, and she told me the story behind them.
“This image is the last photo I took of Havi, someone who is depicted in many of the photos. This is maybe two weeks after her breast augmentation surgery, and you can see the scars on her. It was a very exposed day. Havi is so beautiful, so stunning; she walks into a room and everyone will look at her. In this moment, it became more about her stillness and about her progress and about where she is today. I think this was really a very fulfilled moment for her…I was feeling so proud of her, to see her where she is today compared to where she was when I met her. Not that any of this was bad; it’s just like meeting someone at the top of the mountain. There’s a type of gentleness, I think, in my relationship with her that goes into the photos.”
“I met the boy on the left a week before, on the street. It was the day before my birthday, and he walked past wearing this really special star-shaped top. I usually don’t do this, but I stopped him and I was like, ‘What are you wearing? What is this?’ He all looked so special, and told me that he makes the shirts. I loved everything about him right away. I said something like, ‘Oh, tomorrow’s my birthday, I want to get something from you.’ And he told me that tomorrow was his birthday, too. I took his number and I said, ‘Okay, I’m here for another week. We should meet up.’ And then we texted a bunch and a week later, we met up with his boyfriend, and I just went on this adventure day with them. These are my favorite things, because it’s like I get to open a window to a world.”
“This photo looks like a family portrait, and it is, in a way, a family portrait. The person in the center, in front, is Aine, and she is is another big contributor and an inspiration for the book. Aine is an artist and a painter and a poet. She made a few drawings that are in the book, and she also wrote the closing text for the book. She is also a community leader, someone who runs a home on the outskirts of the city that serves as a refuge to any queer and trans person who needs the place that they can call home. And she focuses the practice in the house around creating. So everyone makes music, someone’s a painter, someone writes. It’s really a magical, special place. She finds that creativity and creative practice is activism, and her way, as a trans woman, to live in an environment and a nation that kills trans people. Her way to resist is with joy and with creative power. Behind them in the frame is someone who was a trans mother for Aine, and she was killed in Mexico. So she’s someone that became very important to her and we wanted to honor her. Aine asked to do a family portrait next to her, and I really love that.”
“This is Maria. She’s probably the closest person to me from the whole book. A lot of people call her mariposa, which is ‘butterfly’ in Spanish. When we were preparing for this photo, I got these actual butterflies in the mail. We have a friend, Karla Donato, who is an incredible makeup artist. At that stage of the project, I really wanted to play with this idea and tension between hyper reality and fantasy. And with Maria and Karla we created a character called The Butterfly. This is the beauty of working with people that you love and appreciate, but also just coming with the openness of, let’s see what we’re going to get today.”
“These are some of the same people that are in the family photo. This is a place where they go to sell second-hand clothes. It’s similar to a flea market, but in this location specifically, there’s also history: It’s where they have a lot of protests. So it is a hangout spot, it is a protest spot, and it is a place where people sell stuff to make a little bit of money. That night, I think we had been shooting at their house and drinking mezcal, and it became kind of a party. We actually meant to get there earlier, when it was still light out, but we stopped by my friend’s studio, and everyone was drinking and partying in the studio too, and doing their makeup. And I loved seeing everyone getting into their character—who they wanted to be. I couldn’t really stop that, the motion of it.”
