When photographer Ryan O’Toole Collett arrived in Mexico City in 2024, he didn’t intend to begin the project that would later become A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest. “I arrived during the build-up to the general election. There were posters everywhere, and everyone was talking about the likelihood of Mexico electing its first female president,” he explains. As he moved through the city by metro, he became aware of the women-only sections on public transport systems. “Learning that they existed in response to violence against women opened up questions for me around gender, systems of power, state responsibility, tradition and change.”

Alongside this, the photographer began to examine how much of his own understanding of Mexico had been shaped before he had even set foot there, pulled together instead from “media, films, news, and the subconscious assumptions they form within us,”. Together these lines of thought became central to the project, which looks at how people in Mexico City define themselves beyond the categories imposed onto them from the outside.

In the project, O’Toole Collet photographs more than 40 individuals from Mexico City and presents 30 of their stories side by side in English and Mexican Spanish. While the work is about identity, it resists offering a one-dimensional portrait of the city: “I didn’t want to make grand establishing images that claimed to summarise the city,” he explains. Instead, it captures a network of people whose lives and communities overlap, and is more broadly “about how people negotiate who they are within contemporary social, political and economic conditions.”

Within its pages, subjects are seen across locations in the city: in a local park, against a shuttered shop, a packed street, an apartment stairwell, and on the bed of a tattoo studio. Some stare deadpan into the camera, others contort their faces into stretched smiles or camera-ready poses. Rather than approaching subjects randomly, he started out with a club performer before being invited to shoot and interview her friends.

In this way, the people within A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest come from overlapping creative scenes: DJs, artists, designers, writers, students, performers and club kids. Their images appear alongside one another, while the interviews and text are grouped separately. “I didn’t want a person’s image to be pinned to a single statement, identity or explanation,” explains the photographer. “For me, that was a way of resisting the idea that people, places or moments can be easily defined.”

Even though he became immersed in the city, he remains well aware of his relationship to it. “As someone from outside Mexico, and outside many of the communities represented in the book, I knew the work carried a lot of ethical weight. Photography has a long history of turning people into symbols, especially when photographers from Europe or the Global North work in other places,” he says. “But I also think the idea that people should only make work within their own communities can become limiting. If we only ever make work within communities we already belong to, we lose the possibility of new conversations emerging at the point of contact.”

There’s a vulnerability that runs throughout the project, as the exchange between subject and photographer unfolded, which also helped O’Toole Collet to learn about himself: “I realised how much photography has become a way for me to deal with disconnection. I often feel slightly outside of things – people, places, communities, even myself at times – and photography gives me a way to move towards the world rather than away from it.”

While it might seem natural for the project to continue, perhaps in another city or with a new network of individuals, the photographer’s next steps underline how singular this body of work feels: “At the moment, I want to learn to sail and go to sea. That might sound a bit off-piste, but maybe it isn’t. I’m interested in movement, uncertainty, distance, and the ways people navigate the world. So perhaps the next work begins there.”

A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest is available to purchase online here