On a trip to Mexico in 2010, photographer Stefan Ruiz stumbled on a sizable amount of vintage Mexican crime photos. He was perusing Mexico City’s sprawling La Lagunilla thrift market when he came across them. Something grabbed his interest and hooked him. Over the next six months he met the seller of the images and made repeated trips to the market to buy more and more, eventually amassing a large collection, which he published as a book titled, “Mexican Crime Photographs From the Archive of Stefan Ruiz” (Gost, 2015). Ruiz is uncertain about where the photographs originated but thinks they came from the archives of the Mexico City police department.
