‘Photography never ceases to surprise me. It continues to give me a reason to learn about the world and about myself.’
Graciela Iturbide
This is a great exhibition, bringing together 60 or so photos by the great Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. All the photos are in stylish black and white and are vivid depictions of Mexican life and culture from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s which almost all have a strange, haunting, almost archaic quality to them.
Mujer Cangrejo (Crab Woman), Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1985 by Graciela Iturbide. Brooklyn Museum © Graciela Iturbide
The decision to shoot in black and white is a big style choice. It sets her photos firmly in the past, into what sometimes feels like an almost mythical past. They have more in common with photography from the 1930s than contemporaneous colour photography from the 1970s and ’80s.
In particular, throughout her career Iturbide has been interested in the lives of Indigenous people of Mexico. For several of her projects she lived with Indigenous people for months, getting to know them, gaining their confidence to allow her to capture snapshots of their rituals, traditions and often threatened ways of life which have lived on into ‘the modern world’. She regularly captures an alienness, an otherness, which is wonderfully strange and different.
Many of her photos are, to the tame English eye, just plain weird. She captures something you read about Mexico, the everyday surrealism of its beliefs and rituals, its obsession with death, with the Day of the Dead, murals of skeletons and skulls on street corners – but also something about the landscapes. Presumably Mexico has roads, might even have motorways, but not in these archaic photos. Here her subjects are set against the barren dusty landscapes which help to give them their stark primeval effect.
Carnival (Carnaval), Tlaxcala, 1974.Courtesy of Evans Haji-Touma © Graciela Iturbide
Potted biography
Born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide studied film from 1969 to 1972 but came to realise her true calling was in photography. While still a student she became an assistant to the famous photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and under Bravo’s mentorship Iturbide began to develop her own style marked by deep cultural exploration and stark, striking visual poetry.
During the 1970s and ’80s she gained a reputation for spending long periods with the communities she studied, getting beneath their skin and winning the trust of people she captures with astonishing candour.
Her images focus mainly on women, sometimes on children, more rarely on men, and has a strong feminist vibe. Her women don’t conform to any western stereotypes but come over as strong and characterful, wielding their own power and mystique.
There’s a time thing at work, too. For Iturbide sought out places and people left behind in the rush to glitzy modernisation. The Indigenous people she studied continued to carry out strange and archaic rituals, often associated with totem animals, maintaining the customs and practices of pre-Hispanic culture, often to bizarre effect.
In Western culture the 1980s was the decade of big hair, the big bang in the City, cocktails, ‘Miami Vice’, fast cars and flashy living – but not in Graciela Iturbide’s world. Here the archaic and the ancient live on in their dusty surroundings, the human figures, mostly women, standing starkly out against their dry, sun-struck backgrounds with the power of pagan gods or of their calmly untouchable human devotees.
Lizard (Lagarto), Juchitán, ca. 1980. Collection Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski © Graciela Iturbide
The exhibition is arranged chronologically into four projects.
1. Those Who Live In The Sand, 1979
Throughout her career Iturbide travelled extensively, documenting a variety of cultures and communities. Her work with the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico led to a commission to photograph the Indigenous Seri community in the Sonora Desert in north-western Mexico on the Gulf of Mexico near the Mexico-California border. In 1979 she spent two months with the community capturing their nomadic lifestyle, their striking clothes and facial decorations, their imposing presence, all against the blankest and emptiest of landscapes.
All of her photos are brilliant, but this was the one I kept coming back to, an image of profound, archaic depth and wisdom. No surprise that just this one image helped to launch her international career. Has anyone ever been older or wiser than this woman?
Little angel (Angelita), Sonoran Desert, Mexico, 1979. Courtesy of a Private Collection © Graciela Iturbide
2. The Women of Juchitan, 1979 to 1989
From 1979 to 1981 Iturbide immersed herself in the culture of the matriarchal society of the Zapotec people who live in Juchitán de Zaragoza in the Tehuantepec Isthmus in south-eastern Mexico. The resulting set, ‘Juchitán de las Mujeres’ or the Women of Juchitán, established her reputation and included probably her most famous image, ‘Our Lady of the Iguanas’.
Our Lady of the Iguanas (Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas), Juchitàn, Mexico, 1979 © Graciela Iturbide, Courtesy Collection Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski
3. White fence, 1986 to 1989
In 1986 two American curators conceived a project titled ‘A Day in the Life of America’ and invited 200 photojournalists from around the world to document American life on one day, 2 May 1986 (do you remember what you were doing on that day?).
Iturbide chose to document the Chicano community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. She arranged to shadow a group of women from the community for a day and a half and produced a portfolio of photos. This one shows female gang members, or cholas, of the White Fence gang. Apparently the gang dates back to the 1920s and their name refers to the painted fence around their local church La Purisima Catholic Church. She shot them in front of a street mural depicting Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa none of whom, it turned out, they could identify.
Cholas, East L.A, USA, 1986. Collection Nathalie and Nicolas Motelay © Graciela Iturbide
As the curators point out, there were complex issues of identity at work here, with the heavily made-up cholas too Mexican to fit into White Anglo-Saxon society and yet themselves alienated from Mexico’s political and cultural tradition, resulting in a double marginalization.
Having established this bond, Iturbide returned to the community over subsequent years, building up a portfolio of photos. This was my favourite, a skinny guy with no shirt holding up a baby wearing a gang bandana and shades, at some kind of street shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Hispanic culture with knobs on.
Cholo, Maravilla Neighbourhood, East Los Angeles, 1985 © Graciela Iturbide
4. Naturata and Later Work, 1996 to 2004
Surprisingly, given her reliance on people as subjects for most of her career, in the late 1990s Iturbide’s photos began to dispense with the human figure and revealed a growing interest in the abstract effects of textures, materials, shapes and patterns.
The last room of the exhibition doesn’t feature a single person but presents an array landscapes shot with a bleak, harsh abstraction which, again, takes you back to the 1930s or ’40s. She did a series of carefully staged shoots at Oaxaca Botanical Gardens, some of them, strangely, featuring cacti tied with ropes in which were bound newspapers, sacking and even planks. Why? I get that the attachments begin to transform these organic plants into human sculptures but – why?
Jardín Botánico de Oaxaca, México, 2002. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © Graciela Iturbide
Other photos focus on ropes or cables looping across the barren landscape or set against the bare blue sky. Why? La poésie pure? In fact some of these images were shot outside her native Mexico, in the southern US, in Italy or India, as she travelled widely, always with an eye for the incipiently abstract in bleak abandoned landscapes…
Installation view of ‘Graciela Iturbide: Shadowlines’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, showing three semi-abstract landscapes photos from her late Naturata phase (photo by the author)
It’s none of the human portraits but these later works which (rather mysteriously) give the exhibition its title of ‘shadow lines.’
A pretext to know the world
In one of her many interviews Iturbide described photography as ‘a pretext to know the world, to know life.’ But it’s a very particular kind of life, isn’t it? A particular take on particular aspects of a particular country. There are plenty of rich Mexicans living in well-watered villas or working in gleaming high-rise buildings in Mexico’s big cities, plenty of middle-class Mexicans driving big cars to work, employing nannies and cleaners, attending gala receptions with their trophy wives. People have been partying on Mexico’s beautiful beaches for fifty years or more.
All of this, all the colour and dazzle of modern life has been rigorously excluded to create a very narrow, specific and culturally unified vision. Iturbide’s work is very anthropological, in the old sense of the word which I remember from university, the study of minority or peripheral cultures, treated with respect, understood on their own terms, valued because they sit outside our homogeneous Western world.
It’s this independence – in Iturbide’s own attitude, and in the attitude she captures in her strange and fearless women – which creates their very powerful effect. The result is not just beautiful but genuinely inspiring. It might not be a quite rational response but many of her Indigenous women feel profoundly free. They look and feel supremely confident and at home.
Baile (Dance), Juchitán, 1986 by Graciela Iturbide © Graciela Iturbide
Triggers
At the entrance to the gallery there’s a sign reading: ‘This exhibition has potentially triggering content. Please email for further information, or speak to a member of staff.’
I searched high and low for this triggering content but couldn’t find any. Was it the dead iguanas? The baby wearing shades? The girl gangs of Los Angeles? Photos of tied-up cactuses? Or all these images of women who don’t conform to any western preconceptions?
Maybe the sign outside should read: ‘Warning: this show contains images of strong women!’ Strong and ancient and eternal.
Video
Related links
- Graciela Iturbide: Shadowlines continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 22 September 2024
- Who is Graciela Iturbide? on TPG website
- Graciela Iturbide Tate article
- Graciela Iturbide Wikipedia article
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