Graciela Iturbide

photographer

Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are political, emotional and often surprising, and she is now considered one of the most important names in Mexican art. Her place in the history of photography is as the most important Mexican photographer after her mentor, Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Her work emphasises that photography not only records the major events of the twentieth century, but also examines the everyday and the unusual in the contemporary world. Iturbide’s experience spans more than 40 years, from her first project, a study of the Seri Indians of northern Mexico (1981), to a retrospective of her work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997-98).
Her photography is memorable and striking because it is not limited by artificial boundaries. Rather, her art emphasises that there are no small subjects and that every moment and every act is essential to understanding the fast-paced contemporary world and the relationships between the old and the new, the indigenous and the foreign, the traditional and the technological.
Born in Mexico City in 1942, the eldest of 13 children, she remembers her first contact with photography being through family photo albums. She married in 1962 and gave birth to three children, but after the death of her six-year-old daughter in 1970, she decided to take her life in a different direction and studied photography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City from 1969-72 in the Cinema Department. During this time she spent a year as an assistant to the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who also became her greatest inspiration.
The importance of this relationship is reflected in the light, shadow and subject matter of her work. Like her mentor, she is not so much concerned with creating distinctions between social hierarchies, but her photographs often focus on the forgotten, the impoverished and the heterogeneous nature of modern life.
After a trip to Europe, where she met Henri Cartier-Bresson, she returned to Mexico and became very active in the Mexican art world, being a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography in 1978. Her opportunity to make an important contribution to the history of photography came in 1979 when the renowned Mexican artist Francisco Toledo asked her to make a series of photographs of his home town of Juchitán, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Juchitán is known throughout Mexico for its matriarchal society and for women of such strength and loveliness that they are often described as having bewitching powers. Iturbide photographed this indigenous Zapotec community, documenting the powerful and diverse roles of these women as healers, community leaders and traders. In this series she captured some of the most powerful images of Mexico’s indigenous people and was awarded first prize at the prestigious French ‘Mois de la photo’ in 1988.
Iturbide is passionately interested in the role of women in the community, and the overwhelming physical presence of her subjects from the ‘Juchitán’ series is felt in photographs such as Our Lady of the Iguanas (Nuestra Senora de las iguanas, 1980), which depicts a Juchitán trader wearing a headdress of live iguanas, a common sight in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In these photographs she transforms the everyday into the mystical, the surreal, the enchanting. It is clear that, like her predecessors such as Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo, Iturbide’s work directly addresses the relationship between history and the present, between the indigenous and the modern world. Her photographs often reveal the mixture of the pre-Hispanic, the Catholic and the modern. Each image is a conscious dissection of the impact of technology and contemporary society on traditional cultures in Mexico and other regions of the world, and the ways in which these cultures survive in the new world order. In photographs such as Angel Woman (Mujer Angel), 1979, which depicts a Seri Indian walking into the Sonoran Desert with a boom box, and The Store (La tienda), 1982, which highlights the continuing impact of the Spanish conquest on local culture in Ecuador, she portrays the realities of contemporary Latin America. In addition, her photographs from the Juchitán, such as Chickens (Pollos) 1979, demonstrate that she does not shy away from stark scenes that transgress sexuality, gender roles and the harsh realities of everyday life in Mexico’s indigenous regions, but celebrates their importance.
Iturbide’s work exudes the rich influences that have permeated her diverse subject matter, and the reflections of master photographers such as Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Margaret Bourke-White are evident throughout her images. At the same time, her portraits of Oaxacans reflect the influence of the dramatic and surreal style of Joel-Peter Witkin, but with the subtlety and sensitivity to her subjects of Diane Arbus’s work and the confrontational nature of Robert Mapplethorpe. The influence of one of her greatest inspirations, the Italian-born photographer Tina Modotti, is also evident. Modotti was a socially committed photographer who lived in Mexico for much of her life and concentrated on photographing workers and political movements between the First and Second World Wars.
Like much of Modotti’s photography, Iturbide’s heterogeneous subjects reflect her social commitment to using photography to change the way the world is seen. She integrates herself into the community and photographs as she sees, finding the beauty or the horror of her subjects and communicating it to the viewer. She is intimate with her subjects, and rather than offering a critical opinion, she lets them speak for themselves.
Iturbide has an international following and has travelled and photographed communities in Cuba, Peru, Panama, Russia and Madagascar in the same provocative style as her work from Mexico. She has undertaken photographic journeys to the southern United States and India, and has been invited to lecture around the world, including Puerto Rico, South Korea and the prestigious Beaux Arts School in Paris, France.