{"id":96212,"date":"2025-10-24T21:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T21:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/96212\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T21:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T21:20:10","slug":"graciela-iturbide-and-the-silent-revolution-of-mexican-photography-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/96212\/","title":{"rendered":"Graciela Iturbide and the silent revolution of Mexican photography | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, 83, stated in a 2018 interview that \u201ca photograph will never change the world.\u201d This view is reflected in the artistic and anthropological gaze that Iturbide has directed at the forgotten villages of deep Mexico, riven by poverty, and on the faces of the Indigenous people<\/a> she has dignified. A photograph may not change the world, but the poetic black-and-white images by Iturbide have managed to decolonize the condescending gaze normally aimed at these populations in order to portray life itself, without any qualifiers. It was a silent revolution in Mexican photography that will be honored with the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award<\/a> for the Arts in Oviedo, Spain this Friday. \u201cIt is society, we, who have to change the world, not the photographs,\u201d Iturbide asserts.<\/p>\n

The artist, who has said that photography saved her from madness, has also led by example, traveling to places that have caught her attention to present an intimate and respectful portrait of their inhabitants. Her work focuses on documenting Indigenous culture and their relationship with nature. In the 1970s, she traveled to Sonora, in northern Mexico, to photograph the Seri people, and from that experience emerged one of her most memorable works, Those Who Live in the Sand. Iturbide gained the complicity of the inhabitants of those inhospitable regions and produced some of the most iconic images of her career, such as Self-Portrait as Seri, in which she appears with her face painted in the traditional style of the Seri women, and Angel Woman, taken while descending from a cave in 1979.<\/p>\n

Iturbide wanted to be an anthropologist, but it was too ambitious an aspiration for a young woman born into a conservative family, whose life was governed by religious dictates. \u201cMy aunt had a small chapel in her house with the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and there were always archbishops, bishops, and people from Opus Dei<\/a> around,\u201d she recounted in May, after learning she had won the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award. She also wanted to be a writer, but wasn\u2019t allowed to either. \u201cI always went to a religious school, to the Sacred Heart. Being at that boarding school helped because they had a very good library of the Spanish Golden Age<\/a> where you could read. Because they didn\u2019t let you speak, it was like being a nun. My father never let me go to university to study literature,\u201d she said. Neither a writer nor an anthropologist by trade, but one by passion, her anthropological gaze has portrayed a Mexico that, at the very least, had been in darkness. \u201cI love all the ruins, all the history of Mexico. In a way, photography helps me discover the archaeological side of Mexico, the poetic side. The camera gives you so many possibilities,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

That passion for Mexico led her in the 1980s to spend six years in Juchit\u00e1n, a municipality in rural Oaxaca<\/a> located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where she portrayed the daily life of that indigenous community, a town known for its rich Zapotec traditions. Perhaps her most celebrated work, it was the one that catapulted her to the top of world photography. It was at the invitation of the artist Francisco Toledo, who was born in that town. \u201cToledo was a great artist and a very generous man. He gave me some prints to sell so I could travel to Juchit\u00e1n,\u201d Iturbide said. Toledo also recommended her, and the people of Juchit\u00e1n welcomed her hospitably. Iturbide was amazed by the power of the women in that town, a matriarchal utopia. \u201cI lived in the houses of the Juchit\u00e1n women and in the end I was able to write a book called Juchit\u00e1n de las Mujeres with Elena Poniatowska [1989]. I would go and stay for two weeks, because there was partying and drinking there, so I would say: \u2018Okay, okay.\u2019 I would accompany them, take my photos, come back, develop them, and see. And after six years of going back and forth, what Toledo told me, for which I am very grateful, was: \u2018When you have the photos, you have to exhibit them at the Juchit\u00e1n House of Culture, so that the women can see what you did.\u2019 We did that exhibition, my first. It was very nice to give back to the people what I had done. Toledo was another of the key people in my life,\u201d she recounted.<\/p>\n

Graciela Iturbide at the Reconquista Hotel in Oviedo, on October 19.Paco Paredes (EFE)<\/p>\n

The Mexican photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio worked with Iturbide as an editor on that project. They are very dear friends, and he says he admires her work and her approach to her photographic endeavors. \u201cMy own growth has come with Graciela,\u201d he says. \u201cShe has those feminine qualities that we appreciate so much today: sweetness, motherhood, the ability to see death, and respect. She represents an attitude of rectitude and honesty with those she portrays, with what she portrays. Furthermore, she has been consistent, and it shows, because when you look at her photos, everything has dignity and a great deal of beauty. She is a global benchmark. I would say that today there is no other Mexican with a similar stature,\u201d he affirms.<\/p>\n

The Mexican photographer Elsa Medina, one of the country\u2019s leading exponents of photojournalism, affirms that Iturbide has left a profound legacy in Mexican photography, with work that has influenced several generations of local photographers. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but see her beautiful images, like those of birds, for example, and other terrifying ones, like the ones she took following people to a cemetery. It\u2019s admirable that she continues working with analog photography<\/a>; I think it\u2019s worthy of continuing to do so. Her work is a great legacy she leaves behind for this country within the field of photography, with her name, but also on behalf of the women of Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iturbide says that it is precisely respect for others that has allowed her to do her work. \u201cI want to capture people with the respect they deserve, not to photograph poverty for the sake of it. I\u2019ve never been interested in that; I hate it. I like to connect with them and try to show their dignity. We have a lot to learn from them; they belong to our culture. However, photography is subjective; the images of the women I took from Juchit\u00e1n are my own Juchit\u00e1n. It\u2019s not like when they come from outside to see \u2018the exotic,\u2019\u201d she insists. Perhaps a photograph will never change the world, but Graciela Iturbide\u2019s gaze has allowed us to see the life she captured in her poetic black-and-white photos in a more dignified way, without portraying it as exotic.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, 83, stated in a 2018 interview that \u201ca photograph will never change the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,64276,85,46,1326,64278,64277],"class_list":{"0":"post-96212","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-graciela-iturbide","15":"tag-il","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-mexico","18":"tag-oaxaca","19":"tag-premios-princesa-de-asturias"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}