Rodrigo Moya, a photojournalist who captured farmworkers, guerrillas and celebrities in Mexico and across Latin America, and whose subjects included the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara smoking a cigar and the novelist Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye, died on July 30 at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was 91.
His son Pablo said the cause was a stroke.
Mr. Moya chronicled a tempestuous period in Latin American history. In the 1950s and ’60s, a time of rapid modernization and single-party rule, he documented the poverty and tumult of Mexico. He then widened his focus to photograph armed conflicts throughout the region and luminaries like the Cuban singer Celia Cruz, the novelist Carlos Fuentes and the painter Diego Rivera.
Although his photographs are considered among the most revelatory of his era — along with the work of contemporaries like Héctor García Cobo and Nacho López — Mr. Moya remained a marginal figure for most of his career.
Armed with two cameras — one for news assignments, the other for personal use — he traveled across Mexico City, documenting strikes, student protests and widespread deprivation.
At the time, his photographs of shopkeepers, schoolchildren and rural laborers were considered too controversial to be published because they contradicted the image of a modern country promoted by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had dominated the Mexican government since 1929. He stashed many of them away for decades.
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The post Rodrigo Moya, 91, Dies; Photographed Che and a Changing Latin America appeared first on New York Times.
