Museo Nacional de la Fotografía

Museo Nacional de la Fotografía is housed within the sixteenth-century Ex-Convento de San Francisco in central Pachuca, pairing a colonial monastic building with one of Mexico's most significant photographic archives. The museum is the exhibition arm of the Fototeca Nacional, INAH's national photographic archive, which holds the Casasola Archive, roughly one million images captured primarily by Agustín Víctor Casasola and his collaborators documenting the Mexican Revolution and the following decades of national life between the 1900s and 1960s. The permanent collection displayed in rotating exhibitions includes iconic Revolution-era images of Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and everyday life during the conflict, alongside earlier nineteenth-century photography and later twentieth-century documentary and studio work, curated thematically around periods of Mexican photographic and political history rather than a single continuous timeline. The convent's original cloister, chapel, and vaulted exhibition rooms have been adapted with modern museum lighting and climate control while preserving the colonial stonework and archways, creating a deliberate juxtaposition between the sixteenth-century religious architecture and the nationalist photographic archive it now houses. Restoration of the convent structure, carried out under INAH oversight, focused on stabilizing the original masonry while inserting reversible modern fittings for exhibition purposes, a conservation approach that keeps the building's colonial character legible beneath its current museum function.