As some of you might know, I was in Mexico last month, for vacation. I visited Cancun, Tulum, Playa del Carmen, and some other places, I also got a car to Chichén Itzá, where I photographed the pyramids and got fascinated by the location.
But I also observed something interesting regarding the Mexico culture, this one, related to hand painted subjects on walls, businesses, or anything that would be lit by an LED screen (or neon sign) elsewhere on Earth.
This touched me a lot, and I started collecting photos of it for a zine.
Let me introduce you to ¿ Pincel o Print ?
Preface
The ads I am used to seeing run on light boxes, billboards, vinyl wraps, rendered from files sent to a calibrated printer, and ultimately, LED screens. A brand color has a Pantone number that is treated like a religion. A logo has a usage guide, and nothing goes up until it’s approved by a bunch of designers sitting on their Herman Miller chairs in a fancy office with the air conditioner blasting and snacks on the table, somewhere in a corporate building.
Mexico works differently. It fascinated me so much that I started collecting images.
Welcome to ¿ Pincel O Print ? (Volume 1)
There, a business can go live the same day the paint dries. No dot-com domain to register, no design software, no print run to order, no computer, no printer.
A wall, a painter, a brush, ink, a few hours in the sun, and handmade talent. That’s the whole supply chain.
What made me fall in love with this instantly was the color. It doesn’t come from a calibrated monitor or file. It comes from whatever the painter mixed that morning.
The magentas, purples, and greens in these photos aren’t CMYK out of electronic printing heads. They’re a hand’s best guess, and somehow that guess is more alive than anything a printer produces.
Then I noticed something else. The businesses with the simplest paint jobs, the ones with a name and nothing more, kept giving me the best food and the warmest service. The polished signs, the ones clearly built for tourists (they call ‘em “gringos”), rarely did.
In Mexico, a hand-painted wall means the investment went somewhere else, into the food, the recipe, the family running the place, or the delivery. Locals seem to read this instinctively.
Even Coca-Cola bends to this logic. Its red, its script, its wave get reproduced by hand across hundreds of walls, brand guidelines followed with total sincerity by someone who has never seen the brand book. A global identity, filtered through a local brush.
This zine is a small collection of what I found looking at walls instead of a QR code menu on my phone. Twenty-two photographs, all shot on a Fujifilm GFX 100S with the Velvia Vivid film simulation, all square, vibrant, strong. Shot in June 2026.
- Raf, from CameraClara
Limited edition of 30
If you like it, and/or would like to support this initiative, you can get yours! I printed, received them all, inspected, and numbered each one. This is not print on demand with a cheap and dirty printing service. I value a lot for quality over quantity here at Camera Clara, so I wanted to receive all zines to inspect the printing quality before having it reaching your hands, and I can say, the print quality on those is beautiful!
Send me a DM if you want it signed, if I know you personally, I will handwrite something that will touch your heart!
What are people talking about it?
Substack community is the best! 🙌
Please consider subscribing to Camera Clara for more articles right in your inbox! Quality over quantity, with the forever love for film photography and its techniques. With a paid subscription, you can shoot me a DM anytime, and we can arrange video calls where I can help you with your photograph needs, let’s be friends.
Wonderful idea, can’t wait to buy mine!
Sounds very cool!