Graciela Iturbide

(1942-)

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

Wikipedia

Iturbide was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1942, to traditional Catholic parents. The eldest of thirteen children,she attended Catholic school and was exposed to photography early on in life. Her father took pictures of her and her siblings, and she got her first camera when she was 11 years old. When she was a child, her father put all the photographs in a box; Iturbide later said “it was a great treat to go to the box and look at these photos, these memories.”

She married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years: sons Manuel and Mauricio, and a daughter, Claudia, who died at the age of six in 1970. Manuel is now a composer and sound artist and has lectured at California College of the Arts. Mauricio took after his father and became an architect.

Iturbide turned to photography after the death of her daughter. She studied at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with the intention of becoming a film director. She realized how drawn she was to photography which was Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s area of expertise. He was a teacher at the university as well as a cinematographer, photographer and became her mentor. She traveled with Bravo between 1970 and 1971 and learned that “there is always time for the pictures you want.” In 1971, she was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant, and a scholarship at the Guggenheim College. Iturbide photographs everyday life, almost entirely in black-and-white. She was inspired by the photography of Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado and Álvarez Bravo. Her self-portraits especially reflect and showcase Bravo’s influence and play with innovation and attention to detail. She became interested in the daily life of Mexico’s indigenous cultures and people (the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Seri) and has photographed life in Mexico City, Juchitán, Oaxaca and on the Mexican/American border. With focus on identity, sexuality, festivals, rituals, daily life, death and roles of women, Iturbide’s photographs share visual stories of cultures in constant transitional periods. There’s also juxtaposition within her images between urban vs rural life and indigenous vs modern life.[10] Iturbide's main concern has 9 been the exploration and investigation of her own cultural environment.[9] She uses photography as a way of understanding Mexico; combining indigenous practices, assimilated Catholic practices and foreign economic trade under one scope.

In 1978, Iturbide was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to work on a series about Mexico’s Seri Indians - a group of fisherman living in the Sonora desert along the Arizona/Mexico border. She was in Punta Chueca for a month and a half working on the series. There were about 500 people within the community. It was while working for this series that her photograph called “Mujer Ángel” was taken. The image depicts a Seri woman while on an expedition to a cave with indigenous paintings. The woman “looked as if she could fly off into the desert” and was carrying a tape recorder exchanged for handicrafts by Americans. “Mujer Ángel” and the Seri People series is part of the Museum of Fine Arts 2019 photography exhibition “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico.”

In 1979, Iturbide was asked by painter Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca, Mexico. It is traditionally a matriarchal society in which the women are economically, politically, and sexually independent. The women run the market and men are not allowed to enter with the exception of gay men they call muxes in Zapotec language. This experience as a photographer shaped Iturbide’s views on life, making her a strong supporter of feminism. Iturbide worked on this series for almost 10 years, ending in 1988. This collection resulted in the book Juchitán de las Mujeres.

Some of the inspiration for her next work came from her support of feminist causes. Her well-known photograph, “Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas” (Our Lady of the Iguanas) came from her photo essay “Juchitán of the Women” (1979–86) which was also shot in Juchitán de Zaragoza. This icon became so popular that there is a statue of this woman made in Juchitán as well as murals and graffiti. Filmmakers Susan Streitfeld and Julie Hébert used this photo as an icon in their film Female Perversions (1996). “Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas” is also part of the 2019 series exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico. Her work in Juchitán was not only about women, however, she also shot “Magnolia,” a photo of a nonbinary person wearing a dress and looking at themselves in a mirror.

Iturbide has also photographed Mexican Americans in the White Fence (street gang) barrio of Eastside Los Angeles as part of the documentary book “A Day in the Life of America” (1987). She has worked in Argentina (in 1996), India (where she made her well-known photo, “Perros Perdidos” (Lost Dogs), and the United States (an untitled collection of photos shot in Texas).

One of the major concerns in her work has been “to explore and articulate the ways in which a vocable such as ‘Mexico’ is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices.”

She is a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. She continues to live and work in Coyoacán, Mexico. In awarding her the 2008 Hasselblad Award, the Hasselblad Foundation said: “Graciela Iturbide is considered one of the most important and influential Latin American photographers of the past four decades. Her photography is of the highest visual strength and beauty. Graciela Iturbide has developed a photographic style based on her strong interest in culture, ritual and everyday life in her native Mexico and other countries. Iturbide has extended the concept of documentary photography, to explore the relationships between man and nature, the individual and the cultural, the real and the psychological. She continues to inspire a younger generation of photographers in Latin America and beyond.

The largest institutional collection of Iturbide’s photographs in the United States is preserved at the Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX.

Excerpts

“All photography is photojournalism, and certain forms of photo-reportage are closer to art than others.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 11

“In her photographs, her distinctive Mexican tempo has been described as a sense of being ‘suspended in time’ and also as expressing an ‘an abundance of time.’ This is not time in a historical sense but time in the present, which means both being present and having taken the time to be present.

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 12

“For many today Álvarez Bravo’s [Iturbide’s mentor] images define Mexican photography. However, others, particularly in Mexico, argue that the visual iconography of Mexico is dominated by an Anglo- and Eurocentric view of the country owing to Mexico’s influx of foreign image makers. They contend that, through its photographic images, Mexico has become part of a world map created from the Anglo- Eurocentric perspectives, which qualify everything they do not know of cannot understand as exotic.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 12

“Weston and Modotti, whose photographs of Mexico are among the most iconic of the twentieth century, were deeply affected by their time in Mexico, and each used the country differently as a muse.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 13

“… Modotti and her contemporaries in turn influenced Iturbide, and represented the notion that politics and art are inseparable.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 13

“The cultural hybrid of indigenous and Spanish cultures—particularly Mexico’s indigenous life as draped in Catholicism and modernity—has been of great interest to photographers over time.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 13

“Paul Strand asserted, ‘We can see what those who go beneath the picturesque surface of Mexican life instantly recognize; the seriousness tinged with sadness; the endurance, not of servility but of courage; and a dignity which oppression was never able to destroy.’”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 13

“Iturbide chooses to photograph the Other—or those who are distinctly individual—without emphasizing the ‘exotic.’ Her photographs… do not exoticize her subjects because she seeks, through them, to understand a culture that is also her own.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 15

“Although, she intentionally avoids making overtly, literally political photographs, Iturbide uses photography to learn, to acknowledge, and to understand what she sees, as well as to explore notions of personal and collective identity in a larger Latin American context in which photography cannot be divorced from politics.”

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico; Guillermo Sheridan, p. 16

“… the larger debate… about whether social-documentary photography was essentially an expression of ideological denunciation, or if it could be a more subjective and depoliticized artistic practice.”