In the late summer of 2019 I found myself in Mexico City. I had quit my full-time job in the spring, and by saving money over the years and securing some new consulting and freelancing work, I was able to go traveling. Very luckily, I might add. The plan was to do a tour of Latin America. By late August I was ready to head to CDMX. I had been there a few times before and already really liked the city. The plan was to stay for a month, maybe two, before heading to Buenos Aires. That plan did not go down the way I expected.

I took my camera with me basically everywhere I went. Over the past few years in New York I had become a diligent street photographer. Toting my camera anytime I went out walking. Always searching for a good shot. In Mexico City the immense population and street food culture meant I was never wanting for human subjects. Most of my photography aims to close the gap between real life humans and our impact on the world. I don’t really ever shoot landscapes. I don’t really ever shoot portraits. I mostly shoot urban scenes and people interacting with those scenes. Sometimes there are no humans if there is an overtly human influence on the scene. Most of my photography also has branding or words in it, as those often check the box of the aforementioned human-influence.

The king of branding in Mexico, in my completely qualitative findings, is Coca-Cola. Within my first few days there I realized the logo was everywhere. On giant billboards, on the side of delivery trucks, on the dozens of bottle crates at every single street food vendor, in advertisements on the windows of convenience stores. Coke is basically the national drink of Mexico. This USA Today article claims Mexicans drink more soft drinks per capita than any other country.  163 liters a year! No family meal is complete without multiple giant 3L bottles of “refrescos,” as they are known there. Construction workers will run to the store to buy jugs to split with co-workers over lunch. Businessmen in suits will walk from their lunch meetings with a bottle of coke in hand. It unites everyone in a sense- all walks of life, all levels of socio-economic standing. It’s like the subway in New York.

When I told my friends about this photo project they always seemed confused about it. They had never noticed the ubiquity of Coca-Cola branding throughout the city. The next time I would see them they always confirmed that they had indeed now started noticing that Coke logos were lousy throughout the city. This was part of the reason I came to value this project so much. Advertising and branding are so ingrained in our lived experience that we often don’t even process the constant barrage of subliminal messages going into our eyeballs. This is not in any way unique to Coke or Mexico, just the specific example I decided to run with. It happens every day, everywhere, in some capacity save for maybe Antarctica and the deepest jungles of the Amazon or the Congo.

I became obsessed with this project. I would go out hunting for new, unique ways to shoot the Coke logo. After a bit I had exhausted all the easy to find ones: delivery trucks, bottle crates, giant billboards. I began exploring new neighborhoods to get my fix. Sometimes, neighborhoods I probably shouldn’t be going to, especially with a camera out. That said, I never felt unsafe in Mexico City. So many friends back in the US would respond to my newfound home by asking “is… is it safe?” Often times, all they see is the media portraying Mexico as a cartel state where no one is safe from the ills of the drug trade. That does exist of course, and like any city, there were neighborhoods where I wouldn’t go or other places where I was extremely cautious. But I did not in any way encounter the cartel-state many Americans associate with Mexico. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be naive to dismiss the notion that Mexico does not have pretty serious corruption and drug problems because it certainly does, but overall it is not the place most Americans think it to be.