Graciela Iturbide
Mexican, 1942-
Cementerio (Cemetery), Juchitan, Oaxaca, 1988
gelatin silver print, ed. 26/150
18 1/8 x 13 3/8 in.
SBMA, Gift of Arthur B. Steinman
2000.50.44
Self-portrait by Iturbide
“The camera is an excuse to share the life of the people, the rhythm and simplicity of festivities, to discover my country. While using my camera I am, above all, an actress participating in the scene taking place at the moment, and the other actors know what role I play. I never think of my images as a project. I simply live the situations and photograph them; it is afterwards that I discover the images.” – Graciela Iturbide
Iturbide with bird eyes
COMMENTS
Working in her native country, Graciela Iturbide creates photographs that have become synonymous with Mexican culture in all its diversity. Born in Mexico City, Iturbide came to photography after marrying at the age of twenty and having three children, fulfilling the pressures of an upper-middle class family. In 1970, after the sudden death of her six-year old daughter, Iturbide reassessed her life’s purpose, which eventually led her to an apprenticeship with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. This bond with Mexico’s greatest photographer led her to see her homeland as she never had before, photographing indigenous people in small villages across the land.
Through Iturbide’s images we come to understand that the power of the Catholic Church could not erase the greater power of pre-Hispanic cultures, which created a country flourishing with modern technologies yet cognizant and proud of its traditional and religious customs. Her photographs tell a visual story of a culture in constant transition through images of identity, sexuality, festivals, rituals, daily life, death, and the role of women. At times we see the clash between urban and rural life, indigenous and modern life, as Iturbide effortlessly moves from community to community on her personal journey through her homeland.
One of her most well known projects was with the Zapotec Indians in Juchitán, a community known for its rare matriarchal social structure. There, Zapotec women take on the role of goddess and healer. Graciela Iturbide has solidified her place as one of the most important contemporary Mexican photographers, whose images reveal her love of Mexico and its people. Whether at home or in foreign lands, Iturbide’s work explores cultural identity and the ways people adapt to modernization.
In 1969 Iturbide began to study cinematography at the University Center of Cinemagraphic Studies. A year or two later she began independent study of still photography as an assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the most significant photographer of the Mexican Renaissance. Iturbide’s early work was accomplished under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, a governmental agency founded in the 1930s for the purpose of documenting and preserving the indigenous cultures of Mexico. She began photographing popular fiestas in and around Mexico City and more frequently in rural areas. Over the course of her career she has documented the lives of several native groups.
Iturbide became interested in these subjects in part because of her early life in a Catholic family and secondary school. In these circles there were ordered successive cycles of religious ceremony. She remains fascinated with ritual, especially in its popular forms. The potency of life is inevitably intertwined with the pain of death, not only because of her personal loss but also because death in Mexico has a profound presence. She seeks to understand the impact of death on the Mexican psyche as a way of understanding life.
In 1979 she was invited to photograph the Zapotec Indians. Artist Francisco Toledo invited a group, including Iturbide, to visit Juchitán, a small town in southern Mexico’s Tehuantepec Isthmus, and contribute to an exhibition for the town’s Casa de Cultura. This Zapotec Indian town had a distinct culture and way of life, notable for the dominance of women in commercial and political spheres.
It was a high mark in her career and resulted in the award in 1987 of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Iturbide’s personal narrative is the history of a woman attempting to connect with a cultural past. Yet, she is not a voyeur. Her work is private and personal and does not exploit the “other”. Her portraits of women do not objectify their subject. They are loving, respectful images that have their source in the artist’s search to understand her subjects’ way of life, their specific customs, as well as the emotional and spiritual forces that shape their lives. It is heritage and tradition that Iturbide seeks to acknowledge. Her portraits explore her own persona as well as that of her subjects. They are documents to a degree, but more, they reflect universal human experience—solitude, pain, and hope.
To make her images, Iturbide became more than an observer of her subjects. She arrives at a place, introduces herself, and indicates that she will be there a while, that she wants to observe as an insider and not as a tourist. Somehow she gains the trust of those she is photographing and is allowed to participate in their culture. In essence she becomes part of the lives of her subjects. That her subjects come to trust her is evident in the images we see. As she said, she lives the situations while photographing them, and only later sees the images as documents of that process.
Her work is just as likely to be politically charged as lusciously seductive. She finds the theatrical in everyday life, often creating a dream-like effect in the midst of the ordinary.
References:
Kendra Greene, Museum of Contemporary Photography
http://www.mocp.org/
Graciela Iturbide at Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, by Jody Zellen, April 23 – June 18, 2005
http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2005/Articles0505/GIturbideA.html
Compiled for the SBMA Docent files by Loree Gold, 2006
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City to a middle-class family, married and had three children. She only entered into her career as a photographer after the tragic death of her six year-old daughter. She would eventually study and work with the so-called “father” of Mexican photography, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, but she would also make her mark as one of the preeminent Mexican photographers of her generation.
Iturbide is perhaps best known for her series of photographs depicting indigenous Zapotec life in Juchitán de Zaragoza, a matriarchal society in which women continue to assert their independence. At the request of artist Francisco Toledo, a native to Juchitán, Iturbide captured the everyday routines of the women, from religious festivities to funerary rituals, while she lived among them from 1979 to1988. With her use of stark contrast, the haunting figure in this photograph is set against the white walls of cemetery tombs. The swarming movement of the swallows stilled by the photographic frame casts an eerie sense of suspended time over this elegiac scene.
- Myth and Materiality: Latin American Art from the Permanent Collection, 2013