A Mexico City Photo Book That Sat in a Drawer for Five Years

2019. Pieter Henket spent time with queer youth in Mexico City, shooting what would become Birds of Mexico City. The work sat unpublished for five years.

Henket, a Dutch photographer based in New York, had grown tired of hearing older friends dismiss younger generations as uninteresting. The Mexico City project was a counter-argument. He documented a scene that felt alive, specific, and worth recording. Then the work went into a drawer.

The delay wasn't editorial hesitation or lack of interest. Henket describes it as a timing problem. The right publisher, the right moment, the right alignment of resources. Five years is a long wait for a photobook, especially one documenting a youth culture that moves quickly. By the time the book surfaces, the subjects are older, the scene has shifted, the clothes have changed.

What survives is the document itself. The images in Birds of Mexico City capture a moment that no longer exists in the same form. That's the value of the delay, in a way. The book isn't reporting on a current scene. It's filing from 2019, five years late, which makes it an archive piece that happens to look recent.

Henket's framing was straightforward: shoot the people his older friends thought weren't doing anything. The resulting work suggests they were wrong. Whether the five-year gap dilutes or sharpens that argument depends on how you read photobooks. Some lose urgency with delay. Others gain it.

Birds of Mexico City is out now. The subjects were young then. They're less young now. The photos remain.