Enrique Metinides

Enrique Metinides, Untitled, 1979 Copyright Enrique Metinides

Michael Kimmelman, in the Times, had a slightly different take on the sources of surrealism in photography:

"That beautiful woman with her arm draped just so over a bent streetlamp, her face passive, open-eyed, with a delicate trickle of blood that matches her lipstick, can't really be dead, can she? She must be an actress.

"Actually she is an actress: Adela Legarreta Rivas, who was struck on Avenida Chapultepec one April day in 1979 by a white Datsun. There's the car in the background, in the middle of the street, its side crumpled like paper. Mr. Metinides's picture looks too good to be true (if good can describe such a horrible accident), except that it isn't. It's surreal because life is."