Casasola, Agustín (1874–1928)

Agustín Casasola (b. 1874; d. 1928), Mexican photographer. Born in Mexico City, Agustín Casasola worked as a reporter for numerous periodicals, including the Porfirian daily El Imparcial. There he began to collect illustrations, documents, books, and photographs which would eventually become the Casasola Archives, containing nearly one million photographs, the richest pictorial documents of twentieth-century Mexican history. The most prolific Mexican photographer of his day, Casasola captured the last years of the Porfiriato, the revolutionary struggle, and its aftermath. Like Matthew Brady, distinguished photographer of the American Civil War, he witnessed and recorded history; his photographs include figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, rebels hanged from trees or executed by firing squads, and soldaderas riding atop boxcars and shouldering rifles. A collection of his photography, including some of what he collected from others, was published by his son Gustavo in Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana: 1900–1940, edited by Luis González Obregón and Nicolás Rangel.

See alsoPhotography: The Twentieth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México, 5th ed. (1986).

Victor Sorell, "Mexposición 2: Images of the Revolución, Casasola" (1976).

Jacobo Wiebe, "Hazañas fotográficas de Casasola," in Contenido 152 (January 1976): 82-87.

Additional Bibliography

Ortiz Monasterio. Mexico, the Revolution and Beyond: Photographs by Augustín Victor Casasola, 1900–1940. New York: Aperture; Mexico City, 2003.

                                 Mary Kay Vaughan