Images © Graciela Iturbide
Graciela Iturbide
Artist's Talk: Graciela Iturbide
Friday, June 17, 2016 at 5:00pm
The Paramount Theater
215 East Main Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Book Signing to follow
Exhibition: Naturata
June 3 - July 22
Neal Guma Fine Art
105 3rd Street NE
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City, the oldest of 13 children. She studied at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónama de México where she met her mentor and teacher, the Mexican modernist cinematographer and photographer, Manuel Álvarez
Bravo, who was teaching at the University. She worked as his assistant in the early 1970’s, accompanying him on his various photographic journeys throughout Mexico. Along with Álvarez Bravo, Iturbide was also inspired by the photography of Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Sebastio Salgado.
Blending her acute observation, primarily focusing on the cultures of her native Mexico, with her own deeply emotional, personal vision, Iturbide’s photographs reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary, evoking the tensions of those who live on the fringes of their own culture with either a sense of belonging or marginalization. She is an ethnologist, anthropologist, and poet. Her images suggest that she is a believer in the decisive moment and in timelessness, a lover of ritual and a celebrator of freedom. Their vitality draws from this dance between the real and surreal, the precise, and the untethered.
Iturbide traveled widely across Latin America in the 1970s, in particular to Cuba and Panama. In 1978 the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico commissioned her to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population. She chose to capture the way of life of the Seri Indians, a group of fisherman living a nomadic lifestyle in the Sonora desert in the north west of Mexico along the border with Arizona, US. In 1979 she was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Iturbide’s series that started in 1979 and runs through to 1988 resulted in the publication of her book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Iturbide has continued to produce important work in Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, Paris, and the US.
Iturbide’s work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997), J. Paul Getty Museum (2007), MAPFRE Foundation, Madrid (2009), Photography Museum Winterthur (Zurich) (2009), and Barbican Art Gallery, London (2012), among many others.
Numerous titles featuring her work have been produced. Most recently, on the occasion of her 2012 exhibition at the Museo Amparo (Pueblo, Mexico), Iturbide reviewed her archive and produced a comprehensive publication of her life’s work organized by theme and includes contact sheets from Oaxaca, Birds and LA series (RM/Museo Amparo, 2012).
Iturbide is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Foundation Award, 1987; the Grand Prize Mois de la Photo, Paris, 1988; a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project ‘Fiesta y Muerte’, 1988; the Hugo Erfurth Award, Leverkusen, Germany, 1989; the International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan, 1990; the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Award, Arles, 1991; the Hasselblad Award, 2008; the National Prize of Sciences and Arts in Mexico City in 2008; an Honorary Degree in photography from the Columbia College Chicago in 2008; and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009.
The Hasselblad Foundation, in bestowing her 2008 Award, stated:
“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.”
A selection of images by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide will be on view during June 2016. Her work depicts traditional ways of life on the verge of transition brought on by contemporary times.
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