Maya Goded is a Mexican photographer and documentary filmmaker. For her efforts to reveal unseen realities and her humanism that goes beyond social barriers, in 2019 Vogue magazine identified her as one of the "8 Mexican photographers who are breaking through globally". Maya explores female sexuality, prostitution, and gender violence, documenting people in Mexican society, people who live in harsh conditions, and in hidden or rejected communities. she addresses female sexuality, gender violence, women healers, and defenders of their territory, whose refusal to submit represents a threat to the norms established by the concepts of power and control. Her constant questioning of preconceived ideas, her effort to reveal little-known realities, her talent for celebrating otherness, and her humanism that transcends social barriers have earned her so many international awards and recognitions.

Hello, Maya,

First of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time to tell us about yourself and your work in this interview.

To begin with, where are you from? Tell us about yourself and your work.

I am a descendant of European migrants.  My grandmother fled the Spanish civil war at the age of 19 and came to Mexico on the second boat that left France for Mexico, alone and without knowing anyone. My mother also traveled alone at the age of 19 to Chiapas (Mexico) and stayed to live in Mexico City, wanting to learn about other cultures and other ways of thinking, she studied Archaeology in Mexico. They had to be very brave to make this trip, without knowing anyone, to an unknown country and without knowing if they would return. I am the daughter and granddaughter of people who could not talk about their pain, their lives, and adventurous women.

For me, it is very important to speak, to break their silence. My passion is to communicate with others and photography was my way to know and communicate with others, to understand the world we live in. It is about having the opportunity to understand, to building bridges from our, every day seems to be the most important thing. Today it is forbidden to know each other, to talk about our differences, to get out of our little bubbles, it seems that we are forbidden to see each other, to break taboos, to break labels.

I have chosen the photographic camera to express these feelings and to walk with them through this life. Since I was a child I made the decision to search in life, to understand our being, and our humanity, and as my family comes from an environment of political migrants or my father who was a political prisoner, I did not want to do it within politics, I wanted to see it, to feel life and from the experience of walking it, to live it.  In my family, my relatives thought that religiosity and spirituality were the same things, and they were not.

What inspired you to approach photography? How did this journey begin? 

 When I was a little girl I discovered that around the camera you could do everything, I mean, I can know other realities, travel, tell stories, and express myself, and my way of expressing myself since I was little was visual.

Of all the genres, why were you attracted to documentary photography?

 I grew up with Robert Cappa's images, with that idea of photos that were going to change the world... but no, I quickly realized that it was an illusion. Pursuing the truth was a crumbling task, and there is no such thing as a single truth. That there are many different visions of the same, that I was going through this reality and from there how I wanted it. What I try with my work, is to build an experience while I am searching, getting lost, while I am trying to understand reality, to understand how the narrative of this experience would be, but far away from absolute values.

Please share with us the photographic equipment you use (camera, lenses, lighting...).

 I've been changing, I started with the 35mm in analog, then 6x6, and then went to digital when I started to be interested in doing video as well, I went through Canon and got to Sony where I am now comfortable. I take photographs and videos.

All your documentary work is an invitation to see the unseen. What made you want to be the voice of the rejected and ignored communities, of people who are forced to live lives that don't fit into the rigid modern society?

 It all comes from my family, my grandparents, the lost war, and my mother who had to leave her place; over time I have also seen the limits of vulnerability. The themes I work on are prostitution, healers, and witches, I am interested in working with women who are questioning this established world just because of the way they live, they are not the women we are taught are the good or well-behaved ones. For me, working from my vulnerability and questioning my taboos and pre-established values is a way of working that interests me. I have photographed from fear sometimes, but instead of paralyzing me, it pushed me. It has helped me to know my taboos and my limits. I like to know these sensations. I'm not interested in certainty either, I prefer fragility.

Technically I'm a disaster: I've lost photos, I've lost negatives... a disaster, but I think the most important thing is to know what you want to talk about, and where it goes through you because I have to tell this story, because this story today and start from there.

I think that each one of us has to find our personal path, our personal way of telling. I would say that everything is already told, and spoken and that the important thing is the personal approach, getting involved in a subject. I love photography as a questioning, an attempt to understand, perhaps with too much stubbornness. The world is like an onion, with layers and layers, as you peel them away, you learn. You don't have to stay on the surface.

Your photographs and documentaries draw attention to marginalized and forgotten communities, and your first collection "Tierra Negra" focuses on capturing portraits of Afro-descendant women.

What can you tell us about this early work and how important do you think this documentary work is to objectively tell the story of the community?

 In this work I learned to take pictures, present myself in the community, to explain the facts. Here I realized that I was interested in women, I began to understand what I wanted to photograph, to interact with the people I was photographing, to discover the sexuality of women through games and those games turned into photos, to empathize with them, to like the differences between us and from there to get the truth.

It has been difficult to talk about prostitution, but a woman who appears in the documentary wrote me a little letter and told me: "Thank you for being a mirror and making me see myself, you taught me to look at myself and I liked the woman I saw". Sometimes it is worth doing these jobs, despite the responsibility, and the difficulty of photographing the other.

"Plaza de la Soledad" is your first feature-length documentary that is an exploration of women's intimacy and sexuality, an empathetic examination of the daily lives of four middle-aged prostitutes working in one of Mexico City's poorest neighborhoods. What can you tell about this documentary? How do you feel about your mission to be the voice of women living in harsh conditions?

I'm not the voice of women, I've just enjoyed watching them for a long time, learning as I spend time with them. There is an "official voice" on these issues, which has never interested me, I am interested in the voices that are not heard, that makes me uncomfortable, and that question me, I do not place myself there. I prefer the theme of the old age of prostitutes or how in a place of violence different love relationships are built, or there is no love. It interests me when I am dealing with a subject that opens up more questions for me than the ones I come up with.

The collection "Welcome to Lipstick", exhibited at the Centro de la Imagen during the FotoMéxico Festival in 2019, includes a series of photographs about the sex trade and drug trafficking in the red light district of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, about the exploitation of women in an environment dominated by eroticism and violence on the verge of death. What did you feel when you took these photos? How did you manage to overcome the worry, and the pain and concentrate on the framing?

 A man came to my house, a Glowogger filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary in that area and invited me to take a still photo; when I saw what area it was, he told me: I can take you to the area because you can't go in there, it's an area taken over by drug traffickers. I couldn't say no, he opened the doors and I thought that since I was there I could take pictures more easily, but from the moment I arrived the women put me to the test and we were building a relationship, when I get to an area it's like recognizing the space but from a very intuitive place. You see where I can walk, which people will help me enter, who can take care of me at certain times, who you can photograph and who you can't, but many times those people are the ones who will take care of you or become key to being in those places. I am interested in making alliances with them. I started to spend time with the electricians, they had a good relationship with them, and they knew every corner of the place so I could get to know the lives of these women. As always happens to me, I fell in love with the women, their lives, the exaltation in which they live, the nightlife, the border...

It was a very complicated job at the beginning, but then it was self-generating. The area was very complicated, it was very sad to finish it because I knew I could not go back.

I had had many complications, and countless stories followed one after the other and for me, it was an unforgettable experience.

In the description of your book "Good Girls," you say the following: I grew up in Mexico City, where Christian morality decrees what a "good girl" should be, making a myth of motherhood and virginity, as if our bodies determine what we are worth as people and, in the end, our destinies. What do you want to convey to the viewer when they turn the pages and look at the photos in this book?

 What I want is for them not to see themselves as statistics, but as human beings, as women, as mothers, as lovers, so I worked a lot with them at home, with their partners, and so on.

I made an exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid with these photos and there were several large copies and portraits of all of the women looking at the camera, they intimidated you when you entered the room and at the same time we could all be, they were in everyday situations in which we asked to be any while listening to recordings in which they talked about love.

For me, working with the theme of prostitution has been to talk about violence, the older woman, the woman's body, and the history that permeates it, it is not to talk about prostitution in a closed way.

Share with us your favorite photographers, and why and how they have influenced your photographic career.

 Someone who was very influential and has become a good friend is Graciela Iturbide. When I was twenty years old I called her to meet her; she saw my photos and I asked her if she needed an assistant to which she replied that I was not going to be her assistant because I was going to be a photographer, but from there we built a friendship and we traveled together, in fact, she is my daughter's godmother.

Andres Petersen, how alive his photographs and he is in them. Saul Leiter, his handling of color and atmosphere.

Which of your works do you prefer?

 The one I'm doing right now: Body, healing, and territory. I'm very excited because I've been working with him for many years. It takes me a long time to finish work and I like it because it gives me time to see it from different points of view. I like the one I am doing now because I feel that it has a lot to do with my transformation of myself; I think I have been involved in a more spiritual search for many years, which is not religious. My previous works have had a lot to do with my parents and in this work, I am beginning to see that it has more to do with myself. I have been working on it for five years and I am going to make a video exhibition here in Mexico and I am working on a book.

In the previous period, I used to think of projects with a beginning and an end. Now I realize that I have given myself more freedom to narrate and weave the stories, and I think this project will continue in different ways but it will stay with me until the end, it is transforming me deeply.

How do you envision the evolution of your artistic work in the future? Do you think you will continue documenting marginalized communities?

 I am more and more interested in giving workshops to the groups I work with; I also see myself working with groups and not necessarily with photography.

I don't know what I will do in the coming years, I prefer to live day by day; I want to be totally free of labels, to build myself every day without ties, and to work in different ways, I don't close myself to anything.