Graciela Iturbide: 50 Years of Photography

 

Throckmorton Fine Art (www.throckmorton-nyc.com) has announced an important exhibition of photographs created over the past half century by the world renowned Mexican photographic artist, Graciela Iturbide.

FIFTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TREASURES celebrates Iturbide’s many achievements and influence extending the development of documentary photography. The show will be on view at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York from March 28 through May 18, 2019.

Poignant images taken by Iturbide over the last fifty years in Mexico highlight the exhibition, as well as a powerful collection of gelatin silver prints shot by Iturbide during long stays in India, Italy, the United States, Madagascar and Spain.  It is the empathy expressed by Iturbide and the deft juxtaposition of locations and subjects that makes Iturbide’s work so fascinating to view. 

The eldest of 13 children born in 1942 in Mexico City to a traditional Mexican family, Graciela Iturbide got her first camera at age 11, inspired by the photographs her father had taken. Iturbide had not begun as a still photographer.  She had originally enrolled in film school at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónama de México but was drawn to still photography when she met Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who was teaching there.  He became her mentor and she assisted him on a number of photographic shoots throughout Mexico. Iturbide was viewed as the natural successor to Manuel Alvarez Bravo. It was Bravo who told her, “There is always time for the pictures you want.” His work influenced her until his death at age 100 in 2002.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, who Iturbide met on a trip to Europe, was another powerful mentor. Iturbide did not create surrealist photographs but Cartier-Bresson’s published Mexican Notebooks presented a visual representation of Mexico that Iturbide could respond to.  Iturbide was also influenced by Josef Koudelka of Czechoslovakia and the American photographers Diane Arbus and William Eggleston.  Other photographers Iturbide admired include Christer Stromholm of Sweden and the Swiss-born American Robert Frank.

According to Spencer Throckmorton, “While Iturbide is well-known for her intimate studies of Mexican locales and native cultures, she is also recognized for the strength of the photographs she created of the Seri Indians living near the Sea of Cortes, as well as images displaying her reaction to the bleak landscapes she saw on an extended road trip through the American South. She also used her camera to capture contrasts in cultures as diverse as Italy, India and Madagascar. 

“We are delighted to be able to bring some of these less-familiar images to a new audience with this exhibition. With her focus on daily life, and death, and the influence of women, Iturbide won followers by depicting identity, rituals, festivals and sexuality in an important way. She also captured differences between urban vs rural life and indigenous vs modern life.

“Of course, for many collectors, the Iturbide images that strike the strongest cord are her 1980s photographs of the powerful matriarchal aspects of the Juchitan culture in the remote southern Mexican city. Known to support the feminist movement, Iturbide drew strength from her long stays in Juchitan between 1979-1988, where the composure and resolve of the dominant women greatly inspired her.  They are considered central to Iturbide’s genius.  What links all of Iturbide’s images is her ability to enter into an intimate world where she captures the very essence of a person’s soul, or a landscape’s allure.”

In Judith Keller’s essay for Graciela Iturbide’s Juchitan catalog Iturbide said, “I spent a lot of time at the public market, hanging out with these big, strong politicized, emancipated, wonderful women.  It was a mythical place that had been visited by Cartier-Bresson, Eisenstein, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, something I did not know when I was lucky enough to get a call in 1979 from Francisco Toledo who offered me the Juchitan project.”

Iturbide’s two most well-known images depict indigenous Mexican women in 1979. The Juchitan image, “Nuestra Senora de Las Iguanas” (Our Lady of the Iguanas) is from her photo essay Juchitan of the Women (1979-86) and “Mujer Angel” (Angel Woman) is from the series about Mexico’s Seri Indian fishermen living along the Arizona/Mexico border in the Sonora desert. 

Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are on view at the Museum of Fine Art (Boston) through May 2 in a show curated by Kristen Gresh, GRACIELA ITURBIDE’S MEXICO.  The accompanying book details Iturbide’s emergence as one of Latin America’s greatest living photographers. In Charlotte Jansen’s write-up in the British Journal of Photography Iturbide says she avoids exoticizing her subjects because she seeks, through them, to understand a culture that is also her own.

“I do not like Mexican stereotypes, but unfortunately many photographers who come from abroad and who have not understood my country fall into this error,” Iturbide says. “I have tried to live with the people of my country and get away from these stereotypes that hurt us.” Her approach to Mexico rails against the constructed perspectives of outsiders. “I have always said that my camera is a pretext to know the culture, its people, and the way of life,” she explains. “My photographs are not political or feminist but I am when I need to be.”

Graciela Iturbide’s works are in the permanent collections of many major museums around the world, and she has been awarded numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997), Paul Getty Museum (2007), MAPFRE Foundation, Madrid (2009), Photography Museum Winterthur (2009), and Barbican Art Gallery (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.

Iturbide had three children with her architect husband, Manuel Rocha Diaz.  When her daughter Claudia died at age six in 1970 Iturbide’s camera helped her get through a difficult period in her  life.  She continues to live and work in Mexico City.

 

---

 

THROCKMORTON FINE ART

For over 30 years Throckmorton Fine Art has specialized in vintage and contemporary photography of the Americas with a primary focus on Latin American talents.  The gallery’s founder, Spencer Throckmorton, has also pursued a long-held interest in Chinese Jades and Pre-Columbian Art and Throckmorton has staged important exhibitions and published numerous publications on these subjects.   

If You Go:

Graciela Iturbide: FIFTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TREASURES

March 28 – May 18, 2019

THROCKMORTON FINE ART
145 E. 57th Street, 3rd fl. New York, NY 10022
212. 223. 1059 F. 212. 223. 1937

www.throckmorton-nyc.com