“The best portrait photographers have a kind of mysterious connection with the people that they’re photographing. You can’t fake that; you either have it or you don’t,” says Robert Swope. Órale: Love and Death in Mexico City, a new book of photography by his late partner Michel Hurst, is a testament to this idea. Shot in the Mexican capital over the course of around six years, there is an intimacy to the photographs, which find their subjects peering at the camera, in states of rest and repose or engaged in rituals of various kinds. It’s a raw and unvarnished depiction of the city, which doesn’t shy away from its social problems, yet one suffused with beauty and sensuality. 

Swope first met Hurst in 1980 in New York City, and fell in love with him right away. “I was bowled over by his personal history, the things he had done before I met him: hitchhiking from France to India twice, living in Africa, hitchhiking across the Sahara Desert twice. He was just a really intelligent, kind, generous person,” he says. They became a couple, then went into business together as design collectors, and stayed together until Hurst’s death in 2023, spending their last years in Mexico City. It’s where Swope still lives today, although he has been troubled in recent years by an influx of well-off American migrants – people not dissimilar to himself, he notes – turning his neighbourhood of Roma Norte into Williamsburg.

Hurst’s photography practice, Swope suggests, was similar to that of Nan Goldin, a longtime friend who serves as the book’s co-editor. “He didn’t really care about technique, [but] he was instinctively very good at framing. None of the pictures have been cropped. If you look at the edges of the pictures, you’ll see details he made a point of including.” Hurst considered himself a portraitist above all. “He had such a profound love and respect for the working class people in Mexico, and the whole point of his work was to honour them,” says Swope.

None of the photographs collected in Órale are posed; Hurst would approach people on the street and ask if he could take their picture, to which the vast majority of them agree. “He would be very quick, because sometimes at the moment you ask someone, they maybe stiffen a little,” says Swope. “One thing I noticed, going through the book, is that he always came down to the level of whoever he was photographing. Even when he was in his 60s, he would fall to his knees to be on the level of the subject. The camera is never looking down on them.”

Goldin was an integral part in bringing the book together, and played an equally important role in the beginning of their relationship. “I was Nan’s lover for about a year before I met Michel. I was living in her loft on the Bowery during a big part of the period where she was making The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” says Swope. As Goldin mentions in her introduction to the book, she realised that Hurst was gay and encouraged him to explore his sexuality. “She said if I wanted to have some kind of fling with a guy sometime, that was fine with her. So, totally by chance, I went to a bar and met Michel.” If their subsequent decades-long friendship is anything to go by, it’s clear that Goldin approved.

It was Goldin’s idea to add a Spanish word to the title, suggesting ‘love and death in Mexico City’ would work better as a subtitle. Primarily used in Mexico, órale is one of Swope’s favourite words. “It has various meanings, depending on the context, but I’m using it here as the English equivalent of ‘wow’! – what you might say if you were walking down the street and saw a car accident or a friend told you they’d got a promotion,” he explains. It can also mean “let’s get going”, an expression used to rally a group of people who are lagging behind. Both uses of the word capture Hurst’s approach, says Swope, not just to photography but the world. “He was so curious; everything in the world was ’wow’ to him and he was always looking for something to discover. He loved life, he loved people, and I just thought ’orale’ was very appropriate,” he says.

Along with co-editor Barney Kulok and critic Chris Whiley, who authored an accompanying essay, Goldin was heavily involved with editing the book. “She’s a master editor. That’s really what she does – with all her books, it’s all about the editing. So she just significantly enriched the project and I couldn’t be happier with the way it has turned out. To me, if something can be perfect, it’s about as close to perfect as possible.” It’s a powerful tribute to Hurst, someone who was deeply talented but, according to Swope, never felt confident about the quality of his work. “We worked together for 43 years and did a lot of really weird, out there stuff,” he says. “This book became our final collaboration.”

Órale: Love and Death in Mexico City is published by Hunters Point Press and available here now.