On Ghost of the Living, Religion and “Disobedient” Imagery: Interview with Diego Moreno

Transmission 394: Interview with Diego Moreno

Diego Moreno is a visionary visual artist and photographer whose work inhabits the uneasy space between memory, ritual, desire, and nightmare. His work is deeply rooted in the intersection of Catholic iconography, Mexican traditions , and his personal history with family trauma and his grandmother. Using photography alongside physical interventions such as collage, drawing, and archival manipulation, he creates haunting, cinematic images that blur the boundaries between reality and hallucination, often exploring inherited trauma, sexuality, masculinity, and the hidden emotional architecture of family life. He bends the camera toward reconstruction, leaving plain documentation behind. His most celebrated series, such as In My Mind There Is Never Silence, serve as a “missing family album,” filling the void left by a childhood overshadowed by silence and the complexities of the human condition.

In Diego Moreno’ s home, the wallpaper breathes and the shadows have faces. Photography becomes ritual in his hands. Using the vibrant, distorted folklore of Chiapas as his medium, he invites viewers into a world where the ghosts of our ancestors aren’t haunting; they are simply waiting to be seen. The ‘fury of need’ that drives his lens and the beauty found in the things people are taught to fear, make him a storyteller of the ‘monstrous feminine’ and a rebel against the rigid structures of his Catholic upbringing. His work invites the monster to tea, seating it at the head of the family table, and in doing so challenges human perceptions of beauty, sin, and belonging. He has won several honors all around the world, including the UNSTUCK Photography Grant 2022 By Magenta Foundation. Canada’s Toronto FOAM TALENT 2022 in Amsterdam; iPhone Photography Awards 2021 New York; LensCulture Art Awards 2021 Amsterdam; Cheerz Photo Festival 2019 Paris, France; Latin American Photography Award POY LATAM 2019 Ecuador; Premio Internacional de la Imagen 2019 in Mexico; LensCulture Emerging Talent Award 2018 in Amsterdam; and the Acquisition Award of the X Biennial of Puebla de los Angeles 2015 in Mexico. His artwork may be found in public and private collections throughout Latin America, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as in solo and group exhibits. The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, Vogue Italia, GQ Magazine, FOAM Magazine, GLAM Cult, Creative Review, Internazionale Magazine, Vice Magazine, LensCulture, PHMuseum; Der Greif, GUP Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine; Fisheye Magazine; ELLE Magazine India, The Sun, BuzzFeed, FutureShoots, Dienach Magazine, Photo World Magazine China, Burn Magazine, and The Culture Trip are just a few of the international publications in which he has been published.

Featured image: Huesped 66 © Diego Moreno
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Raised in southern Mexico he transforms personal archives, family mythology, and folkloric imagery into emotionally charged narratives where the sacred and the monstrous coexist.

You’ve mentioned your great aunt as an inspiration for your monsters. In your photos, these creatures often look more “at home” than the human family members. Do you feel that photography is a way of giving her a “right” she was denied in life?

Yes, absolutely. Photography can grant the right denied to everyone else—the black sheep of the family. I believe photography has the power to be both a very powerful and noble medium. That’s why I love photography’s ability, in conjunction with fiction, to create new, invented realities. Over these more than fifteen years of photographic creation, I’ve allowed myself to reflect deeply on the power of fiction as an essential tool for evolution. Guiding myself in a non-rational way has allowed me to generate this fiction machine in my work, which has enabled me to inhabit and create other worlds, where pain, rejection, or abandonment are transformed into kindness, love, and resilience. What a great gift it is to be able to imagine other possible worlds and make them tangible. Can you imagine the great gift we have through photography? It’s like a tool that allows you to generate empathy through your own individual and collective experience; it places you in the other person’s shoes and allows you to live or feel the other person’s life, even if only for a moment. The power of imagination saved my life; taking refuge in the image of the monster that, in my mind, was my only friend, gave me the chance to survive a truly chaotic and violent life. That is why I deeply honor the power of these three elements: photography, fiction, and imagination.

Images portraying monsters traditionally hide them in the shadows, but your work illuminates the darkness colourfully beautifully. What does beauty allow you to say that shock cannot? 

For me, it was essential to reclaim the figure of the monster, to turn darkness into something brilliant. As you rightly point out: Throughout human history, the monstrous has always been hidden in the shadows, defined as evil, as something that must be erased or that we must not resemble. For me, it is vital to change that narrative based on my own life experience. I play with the figure of the monster drawing from a Catholic tradition in my town: Los Panzudos. These characters symbolize sin and all that is evil in human beings. And I wanted to give them a different place in my universe; for me, these characters had to be colorful and inhabit the ordinary, everyday world just like any human being. In my family, I was always considered strange, a monster, and just like my great-aunt, I was rejected. That is why I needed to redefine the concept of beauty through the grotesque—to offer a different perspective that dignifies difference. To know that difference is profoundly beautiful. And that is why the monsters I use are a gateway to different worlds—whether in body, color, or the preferences for which many of us have been rejected in other universes. The beauty of the monstrous has allowed other people who feel rejected to know that they are not alone. 

His practice resists easy categorization,  at once intimate and theatrical, deeply autobiographical yet universally unsettling. 

You’ve called yourself a “rebel storyteller.” When you use Catholic imagery, like the self-portrait where you sit on an “altar,” do you feel you are desecrating the ritual, or are you reclaiming it to create a new kind of holiness that includes people like you?

Yes, I call myself that because part of my artistic creation has emerged from a rebellious spirit —a refusal to follow established norms. This ranges from my family background to the way I approach photography. That’s why I place so much emphasis on calling myself that. Since I was a child, I was abused and made invisible by members of my family; at school, I was like a ghost. Little by little, thanks to art, I’ve been able to create an image of myself and define who I am. I feel very comfortable honoring that rebellious spirit, because I believe it has led me to become who I am, and so far, I feel good about it. I think I’ve always been searching for a way to create new realities. Often, those who see my work may feel offended and call me a “heretic.” I accept that my work is often built on questioning the family or religious system, and this leads me to (re)construct what I’ve learned, such as rituals. For me, it’s exactly as you describe: I’m reclaiming what I’ve experienced to create a new kind of sanctity that includes people like ME. Although sometimes many people might interpret it as provocative. But it depends on perspectives, and all are valid in this universe. 

You’ve noted that while the men in your family were sources of violence, your grandmother was your sanctuary. Does your photography act as a “feminine” subversion of the machismo you grew up with? Is the camera a “female” tool in your hands that brings you closer to tenderness?

Yes, it’s truly moving that someone describes my work as well as you do. For me, photography has been a profound source of intuition, and intuition is undoubtedly a feminine gateway that I’ve connected with since I was a child, thanks to the love of my maternal grandmother, Clemencia. Someone once told me: “You talk about violence, about very painful things, but in your photographs I only see love; your photographs are filled with love for others.”

Moreno creates visual worlds in which monsters become mirrors, memory becomes fiction, and vulnerability becomes a form of resistance.

And that is something that the feminine strength I grew up with undoubtedly gave me. I’ve always said that my feminine side is more developed than my masculine one. And it is thanks to the strength of all the women with whom I have shared my life since I was a child. That is why I completely agree with your interpretation of how I use photography in my world—as a feminine tool that transforms pain, not only by allowing us to feel it but also to transform it—and that has been thanks to the teachings of the women in my family. It is very beautiful how you describe this point.

You began photography partly because you didn’t have a family album and felt an “emptiness.” Now that you’ve created these surreal, family portraits, do they function as a “real” album for you? Do you look at them with nostalgia or with relief that the hidden is finally visible?

Yes, I think especially in my project HUÉSPED, creating a real family album, with all its nuances. It gives me great peace of mind to know that I was able to bring a painful reality to light and transform it. I’m obsessed with the family album because it’s one of the main sources of fiction in our lives, and it shapes our identity over time. In the family album, we obsess over including only the “happy” moments; we pose and smile for the photographs even though inside we’re broken. It really affected me to find a photograph that my mother had torn up, where she cut out my father; it was a photograph of us with my siblings at church. In that photograph, my mother’s eyes were very red—you could tell she was crying—and indeed, when I learned the story behind that scene, it made me feel very sad. My mother had just been beaten by my father, and yet she still had to pose for the photograph and “smile.” I think that memories of family and childhood are always terrifying, evil; that happy childhoods are more of a wish than a memory. 

The Anatomy of Sin: memory, family monsters, mythology, darkness religion, desire, cultural identity and guilt.

You’ve used the nude body of your family members to challenge psychological bonds. What is the most unexpected thing a family member said to you after seeing themselves transformed or exposed in your work? Did the vulnerability help them see themselves more clearly?

It’s been an incredibly intense process. From the very beginning, confronting my own body was incredibly painful. The first photo I took when I started photographing was a self-portrait—a picture of my back after my father had hit me. That moment was very difficult, but at the same time, it was deeply revealing. Building nonexistent connections with my family through the body and photography has been a painful yet beautiful process. Of course, they have questioned their own bodies, their own histories, for example. I have a very beautiful story about my grandmother, who loved having her portrait taken. Seeing herself naked was a process of learning and rediscovering herself as a woman, since she had lived under my grandfather’s violence for many years and under the prejudices of the Catholic religion. Despite her conservative religious views, she allowed herself to be seen in a different, more human way. Being able to see herself naked was an act of rebellion for her and, at the same time, an act of great self-love. There are many stories behind each photograph—some painful, some funny. Another story involves some photos I took of my mother after my older brother hit her; that experience was very painful for both of us, because I felt that my father was still living through my older brother, and the patterns of learned violence were repeating themselves.

His practice examines inherited fear, intimacy, identity, and the emotional power of the monstrous.

There are also funny stories; one of them was a scene where I photographed my grandmother, mother, and aunt, and when they saw themselves naked, they began comparing their bodies and their similarities—especially whether their breasts resembled their mother’s, their skin tone, and their own scars. It was a truly funny scene where the women in my family felt very comfortable being naked. I think that’s why it was a project that spanned many years; it was difficult at first to build a relationship and trust with each member of my family, especially with my mother and my siblings. Since I first talked a lot with each member of my family to understand their pain, to understand their own story. In the end, photographing them naked was like the conclusion of a long performance. This entire process was one of confrontation and collective healing. Of course, seeing ourselves in a vulnerable state helped us get to know each other deeply, embrace our pain, and transform it. We healed a lineage marked by violence and learned to shape a story far removed from inherited violence. 

Your artwork often feels like a family archive haunted from the inside. Do you think photography can heal inherited trauma, or does it simply give it a more beautiful mask?

I believe that photography itself has the power to confront reality in a very raw and absolute way. Many people who see my work think that because I manipulate the photographic archive, I don’t care about the photographs, that I hate my family. But the reality is quite the opposite; what underpins many of my projects is the love that is built through the process of creating them. Of course, these processes heal and reshape life; above all, they help you understand your history and where you stand as both a spectator and an actor, and decide what stance to take. I believe the power of photography lies in the fact that it is a medium that helps you transform your life experience.

Diego Moreno’s work occupies the thin, surreal line between sacred tradition and psychological exorcism and the shadows humans inherit.

Mexico often romanticizes death publicly while silencing vulnerability privately. Your images feel staged and documentary at the same time. Do you think your artwork resists that contradiction?

I truly believe that in Mexico we live with and honor death. For example, there’s a holiday called “Day of the Dead,” where we honor deceased family members by placing an offering of the food they loved when they were alive. I grew up celebrating death. My grandmother has a deep connection to death and her ancestors. I grew up amidst festivals, creating altars, and Catholic rituals full of color and celebration. Mexico is very colorful and fun, but also profound and symbolic. I think that’s why I’m fascinated by staged photography—because there’s a thought process involved in creating the image. As I’ve told you, I love breaking the rules, being rebellious. And technically speaking, I feel the same way about photography. I don’t limit myself to thinking about whether my photography is just a document or a work of fiction. I love that it’s a mix of both, blurring the lines, which annoys traditionalists who only see photography as a record or a document.

He has garnered international acclaim for his ability to transform personal trauma and collective memory into a haunting, “disobedient” visual language.

You once said monsters reveal truths humans hide. What truth do you think contemporary society is still refusing to face?

SO MANY THINGS! For example, in mythology, a monster is exactly that: something vile, hideous, and repulsive, and it makes no effort to be anything else. In our daily lives, we need to fit in; we pretend almost all the time, creating fictions about ourselves just to belong somewhere. Society continues to deny DIFFERENCE in many ways; we still struggle to accept that there are people with different ideas, different bodies, and many different sexualities. Much of society still believes in the binary, and I think that’s something that makes it very difficult—and will continue to make it difficult—to face our realities. I think that’s why our work is so valuable, because it continues to challenge all these stereotypes that most of mainstream society still holds. 

You’ve been intervening in your photographic support with drawing and painting. What can a brushstroke say about a “monster” that a camera lens cannot capture?

Well, the experience of error and mistake. In a tangible way, being in contact with paint, colored pencils, and oil paints expands your perception of reality, because working with a canvas generates a different kind of catharsis, a different kind of impulse. I like both mediums; I don’t limit myself to either, which is why I like to perceive my artistic practice as an undisciplined one —that is to say, one that doesn’t adhere to a single precise practice or expanded medium, but rather relies on the use of elements, techniques, and possibilities to reinforce ideas, immediate contexts, and obsessions from my own imagination.

His practice is famously rooted in the Panzudos Mercedarios, grotesque, atmospheric figures from his hometown’s religious festivals, which he recontextualizes within the suffocating intimacy of the Mexican domestic space. 

Your artwork speaks a universal emotion language, even if it is deeply rooted in Mexico. Did you ever consciously think about international audiences while creating?

I’ve never really thought about a specific audience; I’ve simply developed my projects out of necessity, in response to questions that arose at a particular time. I believe the magic of these projects lies in their ability to have a global impact—I think that the more personal a photographic project is, the more profoundly universal it becomes. There are no set formulas; I just believe in the honesty with which you tell your stories. That way, your work can transcend borders. 

Photos and images courtesy of © Diego Moreno

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.