In 1949, Leo Matiz Espinoza (1917-1998), the well-known photographer, caricaturist, and advertising specialist was considered one of the ten best photographers in the world. In Colombia he was rated as the most important photographer of the twentieth century, both for his excellent black-and-white photographs and for what the quality of his work meant to the country. In 1941, Matiz started working in Mexico where he associated with artists such as Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957). In 1947 Matiz worked for Life and Reader's Digest in the United States, where he took part in a group exhibition at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also worked in Venezuela as a photojournalist for Momento magazine together with his fellow Colombian, Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1927), who was a journalist at that time.
In her essay, Alejandra Matiz (b. 1958) explains that her father’s life “was like a waterfall in constant motion” due to his incessant traveling and his own temperament. She mentions her father’s relationship with the Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis (b. 1923), who lived in Mexico. The five photographs featured in the catalogue were: Louis Armstrong (1960), María Félix (1945), Don Quijote de Morelos (1944), Agustín Lara (1970), and Mujer indígena [Indigenous Woman] (1961). These images reveal his poetic sensibilities, his interest in documenting Latin American forms of expression, his unique expertise with black-and-white photography, and the contrast between his talent and the social dimension of his photographs.
Leo Matiz lived in a time of profound political contradictions in Colombia. In 1941, as a result of his political beliefs he was obliged to seek exile in Mexico in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. He returned to Colombia in 1948 to photograph what became known as the “Bogotazo,” the reaction to the assassination of the liberal political leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán (1898-1948). In 1958, he went to Venezuela to document the overthrow of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. These political events sharpened his view of the human condition, which he saw as marginalized and harsh. In his photography, Matiz was always looking for a sense of peace that was absent from his surrounding reality in the Colombian violence of the 1950s and the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.