10
B+W
›
›
As they were burying their angelito,
thousands of birds circled overhead.
Graciela looked up and took a picture. ‘They
were the ones that had eaten the corpse,’ she
said of the photo, Birds of Death. She felt as
if their presence was an omen – ‘like death
was telling me, “enough!” You see, I lost a
little girl when she was only six years old...
Claudia, my daughter, died in 1971. I became
obsessed with photographing angelitos so
that I could forget the death of my daughter,’
she recounted in The Artist Series with
Graciela Iturbide, a short film by Ted Forbes.
When Graciela chats with me early one
Saturday morning from her home in Mexico
City, she’s recovering from a cold, her voice
gravelly, having just returned from Boston
where an exhibition of her work is on
show at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).
The show’s curator, Kristen Gresh, made
frequent trips to Graciela’s home over a
three-year period, poring over vintage printsspanning decades of work. ‘I made several
trips to Mexico City for this exhibition and
spent days on end with Graciela in her home
and studio, going through all her boxes of
work,’ she says. ‘Graciela graciously, patiently
let me look at every single photograph in her
archive. During our meals together we spent
hours talking and she generously shared
stories about her work.’G
raciela is indeed an engaging
storyteller, recounting stories
of her childhood growing up
as the eldest of 13 children,
surrounded by siblings and friends and
extended family, where meal times were
lively and the arrival of each new baby a
joyous occasion. We talked about the socialinequality in Mexico that has created
a climate where narcos proliferate, she
expressed sorrow at the scourge of crime
that has tainted her beautiful homeland and
explained her disdain for folkloric depictions
of Mexico – photography that is clichéd,
which captures only the colourful or the
unusual. ‘Many foreign photographers come
here, stay a few days, and take only photos
of things that draw their attention. But their
photos are not profound. When there is an
exotic photograph, or what I call folkloric,
it’s because the photographer has not
understood Mexico.’
Photography is a way of life for Graciela- a way of understanding her homeland
and all its complexities. MFA says of the
exhibition that Graciela’s ‘photographs not
only bear witness to Mexican society but
express an intense personal and poetic
lyricism about her native country’. She has
travelled extensively, immersing herself in
Above Juchitán, 1986. | Opposite Fiesta del lagarto, 1986.‘I fell in love with the
place and the people.’