Rodrigo Moya, who photographed a changing Latin America, dies at 91
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Aug 21, 2025
- 4 min read
By Miguel Salazar
Rodrigo Moya, a photojournalist who captured farmworkers, guerrillas and celebrities in Mexico and across Latin America, and whose subjects included Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara smoking a cigar and novelist Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye, died July 30 at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was 91.
His son Pablo said the cause was a stroke.
Moya chronicled a tempestuous period in Latin American history. In the 1950s and ’60s, a time of rapid modernization and single-party rule, he documented the poverty and tumult of Mexico. He then widened his focus to photograph armed conflicts throughout the region and luminaries like Cuban singer Celia Cruz, novelist Carlos Fuentes and painter Diego Rivera.
Although his photographs are considered among the most revelatory of his era — along with the work of contemporaries like Héctor García Cobo and Nacho López — Moya remained a marginal figure for most of his career.
Armed with two cameras — one for news assignments, the other for personal use — he traveled across Mexico City, documenting strikes, student protests and widespread deprivation.
At the time, his photographs of shopkeepers, schoolchildren and rural laborers were considered too controversial to be published because they contradicted the image of a modern country promoted by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had dominated the Mexican government since 1929. He stashed many of them away for decades.
“More than the beltways or the glass-covered skyscrapers that proliferated along the main avenues,” Moya wrote in a 2008 photo essay, “the city that astonished me was one of textures, of mud and dust and improbable, precarious houses,” populated by “the millions who build the urban center, who pave it and sweep it” and “maintain the movements of the urban clockwork.”
A committed Marxist, he documented the proliferation of guerrilla armies across the region in the 1960s after the military success of the Cuban revolution. He embedded with rebel groups in Guatemala and Venezuela, capturing the fighters as they navigated the jungle in a shroud of fog; infiltrated a United Fruit Co. (now Chiquita Brands International) estate in Panama to observe its miserable labor conditions; and photographed the U.S. Army invading the Dominican Republic in 1965.
Over the course of his career, Moya shot portraits of a pantheon of Latin American celebrities, including Rivera, Fuentes, Cruz and García Márquez, twice — once, in 1967, for the promotional photos for his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and again in 1976, when García Márquez unexpectedly arrived on his doorstep with a black eye.
Two days earlier, García Márquez told him, Mario Vargas Llosa had punched him for interfering in his marriage. García Márquez wanted photos taken as a matter of record. Moya obliged.
“I was concerned about his melodramatic face,” Moya recalled decades later, in an interview with Colombian author Silvana Paternostro for her book “Solitude and Company” (2014). “Then suddenly something happened, I said something and he laughed, and I took two photographs.”
He held on to the negatives for more than 30 years before he published the now-famous image of a battered, grinning García Márquez in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada on the author’s birthday in 2007, inspiring years of literary gossip.
“I’ve never made so much money from a photograph,” Moya told The Paris Review.
Luis Rodrigo Moya Moreno was born on April 10, 1934, in Medellín, Colombia. His father, Luis Moya Sarmiento, was a painter and set designer from Mexico; his mother, Alicia Moreno Vélez, ran the home.
After the family moved to Mexico City in 1937, Rodrigo attended the Colegio Madrid, a school run by Republicans who had fled Spain during the country’s civil war. He enrolled in the engineering program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico but dropped out in 1954 and took a job in a Mexican television studio.
His family home was a gathering spot for Colombian artists and writers, including García Márquez, painter Pedro Nel Gómez and photographer Guillermo Angulo, who offered Rodrigo photography lessons in exchange for instruction on how to operate a TV camera.
Angulo, who worked for Impacto magazine, offered him an internship there; within a year, Moya had been hired as a staff photographer.
By 1967, the year Guevara died, Moya had become disillusioned with armed leftists and with the self-censorship of the Mexican press.
He abandoned photojournalism and started a monthly fishing trade magazine, Tecnica Pesquera. For the next 22 years, until it closed in 1990, he edited the magazine, wrote for it and occasionally supplied the photography.
In 1999, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Moya moved to Cuernavaca and began sifting through his archive of some 40,000 photos. In 2004, he published a collection of photography called “Foto Insurrecta”; it was then that his work found a second life, drawing attention in exhibitions across Mexico and abroad.
In its listing for a 2013 show at Throckmorton Fine Art in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker noted that Moya’s photography “flirts with some of photojournalism’s favorite clichés (the adorable waif, the stoic farmhand) but avoids them with wit, restraint, and a formal elegance that recalls the Bauhaus.”
Moya eventually published 11 photography collections and catalogs, including “Photography and Conscience/Fotografía y Conciencia” (2015), a bilingual volume issued by the University of Texas Press. A selection from his archive is held by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
An accomplished writer, Moya also published two short-story collections. His 1999 book, “Cuentos Para Leer Junto al Mar” (“Stories to Read by the Sea”), was awarded a short story prize by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature in Mexico.
Moya married Annunziata Rossi, a professor of literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in 1959. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to their son Pablo, he is survived by Susan Flaherty, an illustrator, whom he married in 1982. Two other children from his first marriage, Nicolás and Giovanna Moya, died earlier.
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