Whoever does not know Toni's films has not seen Mexican cinema; he was the second cinematographer in Mexico to receive the Golden Ariel. The first was another of the greats, Gabriel Figueroa. Toni received it for his extensive career as a cinematographer, as he has made more than forty films, such as Crates (Joskowicz, 1970), Retorno a Aztlán (Mora Catlett, 1990), The task (Hermosillo, 1991), Mujeres insumisas (Isaac, 1995), among many others. Although this is not the only award to his credit, in 1974 he won the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in film; in 1997 he was selected for the Eighth Biennial of Photography at the Centro de la Imagen, and has won four Arieles and a Heraldo for best photography in Mexican cinema. He is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

On the eve of a retrospective held at the Cineteca Nacional de México on July 18, 2024, about his film career, entitled Luc-Toni Kuhn, film photographer: "between two worlds... always thinking about cinema".We were fortunate to have Toni open the doors of his home to tell us about his life and trajectory in what have been for him the beams of light captured and immortalized in his already long work.

Toni Kuhn, of Swiss origin, arrived in Mexico in 1964, at the age of 21. Thanks to his parents' love of art and images -they were painters- Toni became a fan and admirer of photography. He arrived in Mexico with the fixed idea of studying cinema. In Mexico, the image is revealed to him as a creative possibility, and he enters the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (cuec) to begin his film studies. As a creator, he sought originality, not to repeat fashionable clichés and to take to the limit the semantic and symbolic possibilities that reality imposed on him: to challenge, through creativity, what was established by the lucrative film industry, which he neither respected nor adhered to. He always looked for a propositive, intelligent cinema that would defy the laws of the facts, of conventional images. Hence one of his first science fiction feature films, Crates (Joskowicz, 1970), made with Leobardo López. If one observes the film, one realizes that the photography breaks with previous filmic proposals that follow a similar pattern.

Therefore, it can be said that, in retrospect, Toni Kuhn's work is a continuity and part of this great tradition of Mexican cinematographers, such as Gabriel Figueroa, Alex Phillips, Jack Draper, Agustín Jiménez, to name a few. They were his teachers, his references, although they did not give him - as he tells us - a visual, photographic eye, because whether you are born with it or not, it is almost a substitute for the same language, for the multiple languages, which, he says, he learned in his native Switzerland and which he knew, in one way or another, how to translate into images and capitalize it with a reality that Mexico imposed on him.

Toni's expertise as a photographer has led him to work wonders in the cinema, such as the film La tarea (Hermosillo, 1991) which, as incredible as it may seem, he filmed in two days, and Toni is known in the industry for being detail-oriented and slow when it comes to taking his shots, his approaches, meditating on the image and thinking about the sequences. In contrast to the speed with which he filmed La tareais the excellent film El diablo y la dama (Zúñiga, 1983): fantastic framing and impressive atmospheres, slowly meditated. Abstract forms given by an original painting. A very own style that perhaps he exploits much more in the already mythical film Novia que te vea (Schyfter, 1993), a journey of what photography is through history, a history given by images, framing and the change of color, which, as a whole, creates a very particular style of Toni's vision of filmmaking; a photography, he says, that is not seen; the subtlety of the message slipped into consciousness, without perceiving the medium. That, as I understand it, is Toni Kuhn's style, his criteria, the lightness of the photographer's watchful eye, a visual whisper that sends, very subtly, a message through the image. And his style is based on the pure observation of things, and the film that unfolds his imagination is his language that enunciates that observation. We can see this not only in his films, but also in the still photography that he has done and that can be found in a series of publications, such as The notion of time (Kuhn, 2016), his latest book, in which he subtly captures places and spaces, objects of everyday life, photographs that date back at least 35 years and that he masterfully brings together in this volume.

In this interview, Toni tells us about the beams of light that he has captured throughout his long-lived work.

Bibliography

Kuhn, Toni (2016). La noción del tiempo. México: Tiempo imaginario.

Filmography

Hermosillo, Jaime Humberto (director) (1991). La tarea [película]. México: Clasa Films Mundiales.

Isaac, Alberto (director) (1995). Mujeres insumisas [película]. México: Claudio Producciones/Televicine, s.a. de c.v./Universidad de Colima/U de G.

Joskowicz, Alfredo (director) (1970). Crates [película]. México: Guillermo Díaz Palafox/unam.

Mora Catlett, Juan (director) (1990). Retorno a Aztlán [película]. México: Dirección de Actividades Cinematográficas de la unam/imcine/Cooperativa José Revueltas/Fondo de Fomento a la Calidad Cinematográfica/Producciones Volcán, s.a. de c.v.

Schyfter, Guita (directora) (1993). Novia que te vea [película]. México: Fondo de Fomento a la Calidad Cinematográfica/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (imcine)/Producciones Arte Nuevo.

Zúñiga, Ariel (director) (1983). El diablo y la dama [película]. México: Ariel Zúñiga/Benito Perojo.

Arturo Gutierrez del Angel is professor-researcher of the Anthropological Studies Program at El Colegio de San Luis. Member of the National System of Researchers (sni) since 2008. His research has revolved around mythology, religions and rituals. She has specialized in visual anthropology, particularly in the relationship between photography, plastic and cultural expressions. She has worked with groups from western and northern Mexico, such as the wixaritari or the na'ayari. He has published five books as author and six books as co-author, apart from publications in national and international magazines. He has exhibited his photographic work in museums and galleries; he has 20 exhibitions of photographs related to Asia, "El instante de la mirada: 5 países de Asia". https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2974-1991

Toni Kuhn is a renowned film, video and still photographer, born in Biel-Bienne, Switzerland, on December 6, 1942. Toni arrived in Mexico at the age of 22. He had initially arrived in the country for a three-month stay, but has remained in the country for more than 50 years, naturalized as a Mexican. As a child, at the age of eight, a relative had given him an 8 mm camera, which he never let go of, he recorded everything around him and, little by little, this would become a true vocation. Two years after his arrival in Mexico, Toni entered the cuecdespite the language difficulties he faced at the beginning.