Graciela Iturbide, perhaps one of our greatest living photographers, reveals the paradoxical nature of being Mexican — recognizing the colonizer and the colonized in one's heritage, accepting the modern with the pre-Hispanic, living with death.
Famed Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide says she sees with her eyes but photographs with her heart. Indeed, her black and white photographs of Mexican quotidian scenes don't attempt to capture the realism of a moment. Hers is not an ethnographer's lens. She captures something else entirely — the mythical symbols of Mexico in the pedestrian.
Iturbide didn't set out to become a photographer until her late 20s, married with children, when she finally took a leap of independence after being told by her pragmatic, middle-class family that art was not a viable path. That yearning is present even in her earliest of work. In each of these themes, the draw is not only with the Mexican scenes, but with Iturbide's intuitive capturing of them. In one of her most famous photographs titled"Angel Woman," an indigenous woman holds a boombox as she seemingly floats through a desert sierra. Iturbide says she doesn't remember taking the photo and only discovered it later in her contact sheet. It was a gift from the desert, she says.That's not to say her photos lack technical brilliance.
Many seasons ago, Iturbide became obsessed with photographing"angelitos," dead babies in coffins on their way to their burial. She'd lost her own daughter and photographing the young children was her way of untangling her grief. It was only after she encountered a rotting dead body that vultures had fed on out in the open at a cemetery that she stopped photographing the dead babies. It was as if death had told her:"You search for me. Here I am. Enough.
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