Further reading — A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest

An empty road and suspended traffic lights at dusk, Mexico City, 2024.

A wet street and worn buildings at night, Mexico City, 2024.

A field of dry grasses beside a sunlit treeline.

Black-and-white photograph: a person standing beneath a tree at night.

All photographs →

Choose a photograph, then select it again to enter the project.

A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest asks how people can be encountered without being reduced to a type, a label or a single account of who they are. Developed in Mexico City in 2024 through portraits and conversations with people from overlapping queer and creative communities, the project considers how a sense of self changes through relationships, place and the conditions of everyday life.

The conversations move between friendship, pleasure and creative work, and questions of class, migration and exclusion. Community emerges as something continually made and contested. It can offer support and a sense of belonging while also reproducing conflict and hierarchy. The contributors’ different experiences resist being gathered into one representative story of the city.

The book places these accounts in English and Mexican Spanish, independently of the portraits. Names belong to the texts, without identifying the faces in the photographs. This separation challenges the expectation that appearance can reveal a person’s history, or that one statement can explain an image. Language brings experiences beyond what is visible, while the photographs leave room for encounters that words cannot settle.

The project also asks how assumptions about Mexico shape the act of looking. Several contributors question the unequal freedoms of visitors and migrants, and what it means to enter a place, make work there and take that work elsewhere. These questions extend to the photographs and the book’s own circulation. Keeping disagreement within the work makes the responsibilities of representation part of its subject. What remains open is how to recognise another person without assuming that recognition amounts to complete understanding.