A man slumps limply across a wooden bench, his face twisted upward in a mask of agony or release, while a foot juts grotesquely from his exposed side. The lines cut into the plate by José Guadalupe Posada are raw and direct, every hatch and shadow emphasizing the unnatural bulge and the slackness of limbs. The print’s stark black and white palette heightens the sense of something uncanny—a body both familiar and impossible.

The viewer’s eye is drawn first to the wound, then to the strange foot, and finally to the man’s face, where the mouth hangs open, perhaps mid-scream or in the final silence. There is no background to soften the scene; the focus is absolute, the mood both clinical and surreal. Works like this, created in Mexico between about 1880 and 1910, belong to a world of popular prints that thrived on the sensational, the bizarre, and the macabre. Posada became famous for his broadsides—cheap, widely-circulated prints that commented on news, crime, and curiosities, often with a satirical edge.

These images were sold in markets and on street corners, meant to catch the eye and provoke a reaction. The Metropolitan Museum of Art now preserves this print as part of its open access collection, though history has kept few traces of its original context or audience. What remains is the shock of the image itself, daring us to look closer and wonder at the strange stories that once flickered through the streets of turn-of-the-century Mexico.