Enrique Metinides

From 1948 until his forced retirement in 1979, the Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides took thousands of images and followed hundreds of stories in and around Mexico City. And what images and stories they were: car wrecks and train derailments, a bi-plane crashed on to a roof, street stabbings and shootings in the park, apartments and petrol stations set alight, earthquakes, accidental explosions, suicides, manslaughters, murder. Metinides photographed his first corpse when he was 12. A year later, he became an unpaid assistant to the crime photographer of Mexican newspaper La Prensa, and his pictures appeared in La Nota Roja - the red note or, more colloquially, the Bloody News, the best-selling tabloid. Now almost 70, Metinides is about to hold his first European show. He has said that he based his photographic style on black-and-white action movies, on cops and gangster flicks.