Since the landmark exhibition of his photographs in Bellas Artes in 1980 and their subsequent publication in Inframundo, Rulfo has become increasingly recognized as a photographer of consequence. Other exhibitions followed, together with excellent reproductions of his prints in beautifully produced volumes such as Mexico: Juan Rulfo fotógrafo, accompanied by admiring essays by figures such as Carlos Fuentes, Margo Glantz and Erika Billeter. Since the turn of the century a considerable body of well-informed and thoughtful criticism has been established. While much of this would almost certainly not have happened had Rulfo not been a celebrated and revered writer, the quality, scope and weight of his photographic production has been stressed by critics and fellow photographers alike. Rulfo was extremely knowledgeable about the history and aesthetics of photography, possessed an impressive library on the subject, and wrote discerningly about Cartier Bresson's Mexican photographs and the work of Nacho López, but he wrote virtually nothing about his own photographs that might have provided a ready conceptual or ideological framework to guide the viewer.

The bulk of Rulfo's photographic production belongs to the 1940s and 1950s and thus largely coincided with the writing of his books, but the fact that the former only became widely known much later meant that, initially at least, the photography was viewed through the lens of El Llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo before a critical balance between the relative autonomy of the two artistic spheres was established. Certain shared elements are immediately evident. Buildings are ravaged and ruined by time, nature and history; gaps, openings and broken archways breach their integrity; people are poised on the threshold between inside and outside, and peer disturbingly towards something beyond the frame of the photograph, hidden from the viewer or reader. Dramatically arid landscapes threaten to overwhelm those who inhabit them. The essential presence of death in the photographic act has become something of a commonplace since Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire. Sontag wrote: ‘All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt’ (15).