I recently managed to lay my hands on a copy of Health & Efficiency (2009) by Jerónimo López Ramírez, better known as Dr. Lakra. It’s a fascinating book that sits at the intersection of vintage nudist culture and Mexican folk art. The book takes its name from the iconic British naturist magazine.
Lakra found his source material in London. As he recalls, “I bought the magazines at the Brick Lane market all at once. There were about twenty of them and cost me five pounds, or something like that. Extremely cheap. It was raining that day and they were wet.”
Lakra worked directly on the magazine pages using India ink to create silhouettes, then scratched into them with tattooing needles. He employs various mediums — diluted ink, pencil, vinyl, and white wash — to create different effects in his overlaid designs.
The artist’s interventions are both playful and unsettling. These additions create a compelling dialogue between the photographs’ original context of health, freedom, and natural living, and darker themes of mortality and the supernatural.
The work reminds me of the artist Ramon Maiden, who employs similar techniques of drawing over vintage photographs (see this picture of Pamela Green). Both artists engage with vintage nudity and pin-up culture, using tattoo-inspired overlays to subvert and recontextualize these historical images.
What makes Lakra’s work particularly intriguing is how it draws from diverse artistic traditions – from Medieval illuminated manuscripts to Hieronymus Bosch to modern tattoo artistry. The velvet-bound volume itself is an art object, a contemporary “illuminated manuscript” that transforms celebrations of the body into meditations on mortality.
Based in Oaxaca and born in 1972, Dr. Lakra. He has shown work internationally in exhibitions including at Tate Modern and Barbican Centre in London, Drawing Center in New York City, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca in Mexico, and Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.
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