Free-spirited, otherworldly portraits of Mexico City’s queer youth

Pieter Henket’s entry to the world of image and film making came largely by accident. He had grown up in a small village in the Netherlands, and in 1999 he was in New York City attending a course at the New York Film Academy, when he spotted a crew shooting a movie on the street. There, acting, were Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman as queer cult classic Flawless was in production, which sees the latter play a trans woman who unexpected befriends the former – a retired homophobic security guard.

“My parents were very open minded, but as much as the government can be very free, as a teenage kid in the Netherlands the people can be conservative,” he explains. ​“So this movie really opened my eyes. I remember standing there thinking, ​‘I should never go back to Holland because I belong here.’ I became friends with the interns and they would tell me where they would be filming every day, and I followed the director Joel Schumacher and Robert De Niro around for two weeks.”

Seeing an opening one afternoon, the young Henket, who was aged 19 at the time approached De Niro and the film’s director Joel Schumacher and introduced himself. As it turned out, they’d noticed him hanging around the set, and offered him the opportunity to intern for the rest of the production. ​“That’s where I really fell in love with lighting, and staging scenes,” Henket says. ​“Creating an imaginary world where people can be actors in.”

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That attitude has stuck with him ever since, and is found all throughout his work, from the celebrity portraits and album covers – including the cover for Lady Gaga’s breakout The Fame – to highlighting the lives, stories and folklore of people living in the Congo Basin. And it’s everywhere in his new photobook Birds of Mexico City.

The project, which follows up from his 2019 series Birds of New York, saw Henket set up a studio that acted as a blank canvas for queer youth of Mexico’s capital to express themselves without restraint. To bring it to life, he worked closely and collaboratively with a team of entirely LGBTQ+ young people from the city, who helped to cast, set design, style and even structure the final layout of the book. 

“The end result – the picture – is one thing, but the process is so important,” Henket says. ​“And [stylist] Chino Castilla’s process with his entirely queer team – we got a space where they could make all the costumes with papier-mâché, and they were in there for a month creating things. To see the joy that they all have together and being able to uplift that community and the people being photographed was special.”

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Birds of Mexico City’s black-and-white portraits are striking and empowering, and a testament to the unafraid freedom of the younger generations of today. Costumes are elaborate and rich in detail, while also interrogating and reframing local folk tropes, artefacts, the land and indigenous patterns. There are lucha libre masks, a dress made entirely out of straw hats, and ponchos.

Its pages and spreads are a blank canvas for the young people participating space to subvert and then reclaim Mexican identity – and gender identity – for themselves. ​“In Mexico, women are meant to be very feminine, while the man may have a moustache and is expected to be very macho,” he says. ​“In New York City, it’s easy to be different, but in Mexico City, it takes more bravery. In some ways Mexico City lets you be free and expressive, but at the same time the young people also deal with the harder sides of their backgrounds and families, and these people stay true to themselves and how they express themselves.”

Challenging gender norms takes on particular weight in Mexico, which is the second most dangerous country in the world for trans people, behind only Brazil. Finding joy, and creativity within that, is a radical act. Beyond the portraits, the book is filled with poems and texts written by those who feature in the photographs, which speak to their diverse experiences of growing up in the country.

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Ultimately, Birds of Mexico City is a platform for LGBTQ+ youth to stage their own scenes and be creative, just as Henket first learnt how to do in 1999, when he first stepped into the production crew in Flawless. ​“Even if nobody ever sees the book,” he says. ​“To have a little moment of joy and for us to have that experience on set with these kids feeling appreciated, getting dressed is a small, but beautiful thing.”

Birds of Mexico City by Pieter Henket is published by Damiani Books.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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