Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (born May 16, 1942) is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum. to traditional Catholic parents. The eldest of thirteen children, she attended Catholic school and was exposed to photography early on in life. Her father took pictures of her and her siblings, and she got her first camera when she was 11 years old. When she was a child, her father put all the photographs in a box; Iturbide later said: "it was a great treat to go to the box and look at these photos, these memories."

She married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years: sons Manuel and Mauricio, and a daughter, Claudia, who died at the age of six in 1970. Manuel is now a composer and sound artist and has lectured at California College of the Arts. Mauricio took after his father and became an architect.

Photography career In 1970 Iturbide turned to photography after the death of her six-year-old daughter Claudia. She studied at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with the intention of becoming a film director. She realized how drawn she was to photography, which was Manuel Álvarez Bravo's area of expertise. He was a teacher at the university as well as a cinematographer, photographer, and subsequently became her mentor. In 1971 she was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant, and a scholarship at the Guggenheim College.

Style and influence Iturbide photographs everyday life, almost entirely in black-and-white, following her curiosity and photographing when she sees what she likes. She was inspired by the photography of Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Her self-portraits especially reflect and showcase Bravo's influence and play with innovation and attention to detail. She became interested in the daily life of Mexico's indigenous cultures and people (the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Seri ) and has photographed life in Mexico City, Juchitán, Oaxaca and on the Mexican-American border (La Frontera). With focus on identity, sexuality, festivals, rituals, daily life, death, and roles of women, Iturbide's photographs share visual stories of cultures in constant transitional periods. There's also juxtaposition within her images between urban vs rural life, and indigenous vs modern life. Iturbide's main concern has been the exploration and investigation of her own cultural environment. Art critic, Oscar C. Nates, has described Iturbide's work as "anthropoetic." The image depicts a Seri woman while on an expedition to a cave with indigenous paintings. The woman “looked as if she could fly off into the desert” and was carrying a tape recorder which she had exchanged for handicrafts with Americans.

In 1979, Iturbide was asked by painter Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca, Mexico. It is traditionally a matriarchal society in which the women are economically, politically, and sexually independent. The women run the market, and men are not allowed to enter with the exception of gay men, whom they call "muxes" in the Zapotec language. This experience as a photographer shaped Iturbide's views on life. Iturbide worked on this series for almost 10 years, ending in 1988. This collection resulted in the book Juchitán de las Mujeres.

"Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas" and "Magnolia" "Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas" (1979)Some of the inspiration for her next work came from her support of feminist causes. Her well-known photograph, "Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas" (Our Lady of the Iguanas) came from her photo essay "Juchitán of the Women (1979–86)" which was also shot in Juchitán de Zaragoza. This icon became so popular that there is a statue of this woman made in Juchitán as well as murals and graffiti. However, her work in Juchitán was not only about women, as she also photographed "Magnolia", a photo of a nonbinary person wearing a dress and looking at themselves in a mirror.

"Juchitan de Las Mujeres"

Iturbide created this series between the years of 1979 to 1989 when she became entranced with the women-centered community of the Zapotec Indians, located in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca; the most purely indigenous community in Mexico. Iturbide found these women's political, sexual, and economic freedom deeply inspiring.

Iturbide's method of documentation was not like the common distanced photographer. Instead, Iturbide took the time to get to know the women on a personal level. By doing so, Iturbide gained their trust and permission to photograph them. With their trust, Iturbide was invited to film many of their private celebrations and she became exposed to the Zapotec people through the eyes of the indigenous women.

She is a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. She continues to live and work in Coyoacán, Mexico.

In awarding her the 2008 Hasselblad Award, the Hasselblad Foundation said:

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. Some of Iturbide's recent work documents refugees and migrants. In her work "Refugiados" (2015), offers a stark contrast between love and family and danger and violence showing a smiling mother holding her child in front of a hand-painted mural of Mexico dotted with safety and danger zones.

The largest institutional collection of Iturbide's photographs in the United States is preserved at the Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX.

Publications

Images of the spirit. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1996. . La Forma y la Memoria = "Form and Memory". Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, 1996. . Eyes to fly with: portraits, self-portraits, and other photographs. Austin, University of Texas, 2006. . Iturbide. Madrid: tf. editores, 2003. . Graciela Iturbide. London: Phaidon, 2006. Edited and with an essay by Marta Gili. . Phaidon, 2011. Torrijos: The Man and the Myth. Madrid: Umbrage, 2008. . Graciela Iturbide: Juchitán. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. . Barcelona: RM, 2011. . Des Oiseaux. Paris: Xavier Barral, 2019. . White Fence. Mexico: RM, 2024. . Graciela Iturbide. New York, 2025.

Awards 1987: W. Eugene Smith Grant from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund 1988: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1990: International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan 1991: Award Recontres Photographiques, Arles, France National Prize for Arts: Fine Arts 2021: Outstanding Contribution to Photography, Sony World Photography Awards 2022: Induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum 2025: Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts

Exhibitions 1980: Graciela Iturbide, New Mexico 1990: External Encounters, Internal Imaginings: The Photographs of Graciela Iturbide, at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA 1991: Rencontres d'Arles Festival, Arles, France 1997–1998: Images of Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA 2000: Images of Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC 2003: Pajaros et Paisajes (Birds and Sights), Robert Miller Gallery, New York City 2003: Pajaros et Paisajes, OMG Gallery for Contemporary Art, Düsseldorf, Germany 2007–2008: The Goat's Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, LA 2008: Torrijos: The Man and the Myth, Americas Society, New York 2011: Rencontres d'Arles Festival, Arles, France 2011: Retrospective, Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil 2015: Naturatta | Baño de Frida, Helinä Rautavaara Museum, Espoo, Finland 2016: Graciela Iturbide: A Lens to See, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX, for Fotoseptiembre USA 2017: Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejon, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, CA 2019: "Graciela Iturbide's Mexico", Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA 2019: "Graciela Iturbide's Mexico", Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minneapolis MN 2020: "Graciela Iturbide's Mexico", National Museum of Women in the Arts 2025-26: "Graciela Iturbide: Serious Play," International Center of Photography, New York City 2026: "Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Collections Iturbide's work is held in the following permanent collections: Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Museum of Modern Art, New York City Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX