Photographing Children in Mexico City's Red‐Light Districts

Abstract

This paper analyses Mexican photographer Maya Goded's representations of children living in one of Mexico City's red‐light districts. Drawing on interviews with the photographer, the practical and ethical difficulties in portraying vulnerable children are analysed to examine the representational limitations of photography in confrontation with child sex exploitation. Through close visual analysis of the images, the paper examines the children's representations as both externalised repositories of their parents' aspirations and their keen imitators. The figure of the child becomes a locus for interpolating critiques of sex work, demonstrating how photographs forge a cultural space where they become politically salient records of vulnerability in the face of neoliberal deregulation and economic rationality.