Born in Pforzheim, Germany, Carl Wilhelm Kahlo was a photographer whose work constitutes the broadest and richest photographic, documentary, historical and aesthetic inventory of Mexico’s architectural heritage: a vast visual imaginary that can well be appreciated as an invaluable documentary and historical record of the national architectural scene, as well as a successful visual treatise created from a particular aesthetic position and careful mise-en-scène constructed with the close complicity of light.

He translated those realities through long exposures to natural light, on 11 x 14″ glass plates, prepared and developed by himself, printed by contact from the glass plates, on self-printing paper, toned in gold-platinum. Undoubtedly, a successful and balanced composition of spaces and planes, drawn with a photographic palette prodigious in whites, blacks and grays, in lights and shadows.

In 1908, the Minister of Finance of the Government of Porfirio Díaz, José Ives Limantour, commissioned him to carry out the photographic inventory of the temples and churches of federal property and to carry out a registration, a visual and documentary survey of real estate and national monuments. In 1924 he began the publication of his series of 5 volumes on the Churches of Mexico, also illustrated with drawings by Dr. Atl.

Father of Frida Kahlo, his work has been widely valued, today, as the most artistic and systematic repertoire of images on the richness of civil and religious architecture in our country. And it has been exhibited on multiple occasions, in Mexico and abroad, and also published in dozens of books and magazines of the time.