GRACIELA ITURBIDE
Mexican
Now aligned with the most notable names in Mex-
ican art, Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are poli-
tical, emotional, and often surprising. Though only
in mid career, her place in the history of photogra-
phy has been firmly established as the foremost
Mexican photographer after her mentor, Manuel
A ́lvarez Bravo. Her work emphasizes that photo-
graphy more than captures the main events of the
twentieth century; it looks closely at the everyday
and the unusual of the contemporary world. Itur-
bide has more than 20 years of experience, ranging
from her first project, a study of the Seri Indians in
Northern Mexico (1981), to a retrospective of her
work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997–
98). Her photography is memorable and striking
because she is not limited by artificial borders.
Rather, her art emphasizes that there are no
minor subjects and that each moment and each
act are integral to understanding the fast-paced
contemporary world and the relations between the
old and the new, the indigenous and the foreign,
the traditional and the technological.
Born in Mexico City in 1942 as the oldest of 13
children, she remembers how she made her first
contact with photography by looking through
family photo albums. She married in 1962 and
gave birth to three children, but after the 1970
death of her six-year-old daughter, she decided to
take her life in a different direction, and she studied
photography at Mexico City’s National Autono-
mous University from 1969–72 in the Department
of Cinema. It was during this time that she spent a
year as assistant to Mexican photographer Manuel
A ́lvarez 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 concerned so
much with creating distinctions between social
hierarchies, but instead her photographs often con-
centrate 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 be-
came very active in the Mexican art world, and in
1978 she was a founding member of the Mexican
Council of Photography. Her opportunity to make
an important contribution to the history of photo-
graphy came in 1979, when renowned Mexican
artist Francisco Toledo asked her to do a series of
photographs of his hometown, Juchita ́n, Oaxaca,
in southern Mexico. Juchita ́n is known throughout
Mexico for its matriarchal society and for women
of such strength and loveliness that they are often
referred to as having bewitching powers. Iturbide
photographed this indigenous Zapotec community
and documented the powerful and multi-faceted
role of these women as healers, community leaders,
and merchants. In this series, she captured some of
the most powerful images of the Mexican indigen-
ous and was awarded the first prize at France’s
prestigious people ‘‘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 subject matter from the
‘‘Juchita ́n’’ series is felt in photographs such as
Our Lady of the Iguanas(Nuestra Sen ̃ora de las
iguanas) 1980) depicting a Juchita ́n merchant wear-
ing 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 to see how, like
her predecessors such as Rufino Tamayo and Frida
Kahlo, Iturbide’s work directly addresses the rela-
tion between history and the present, between the
indigenous and the modern world. Her photo-
graphs often reveal the mixture of the pre-Hispa-
nic, the Catholic, and the modern. Each image is a
conscious dissection of the impact that technology
and contemporary society have made on tradi-
tional cultures in Mexico and other regions of the
world and the ways these cultures are surviving the
New World Order. In photographs such asAngel
Woman(Mujer Angel) 1979, which portrays a Seri
Indian walking into the Sonoran desert with a
boom box, andThe Store(La tienda) 1982, which
highlights the on-going impact of the Spanish Con-
quest on the local culture in Ecuador, she portrays
the realities of contemporary Latin America. In
addition, her photographs from the Juchita ́n such
asChickens(Pollos) 1979. demonstrate that she
does not turn away from stark scenes that trans-
gress sexuality, gender roles, and the harsh realityITURBIDE, GRACIELA