Kerry Kilburn Weekly Post 2/29/2016

Graciela Iturbide
Graciela Iturbide at the Getty
Graciela Iturbide at art21 (includes a great short video)

Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942, the eldest of 13 children. She attended the Center for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico with the goal of becoming a film director. She became interested in the still photography of the modernist master Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and began to study photography under his mentorship instead. Since the early 1970s, she has traveled widely throughout Mexico, the US, and Europe working on various commissions and projects. Her work is held in a number of prestigious collections and she has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. She is especially well known for her work among several of Mexico's indigenous cultures. She tries to integrate herself into their communities in order to document them; she says her work cannot be objective because she isn't.

Iturbide's work attracts me on several levels. As purely documentary, ethnographic work, it allows me glimpses into cultures I've never seen, and does so in a very intimate and loving way - I never feel like a voyeur, although I am very aware that I am an "other" looking into a world very different from my own. It also reminds me that what we see now as indigenous culture is really a blend of original indigenous traditions with introduced Catholicism - so some things have already, perhaps, been lost. And it doesn't take a great imagination to understand that the traditions she has photographed are themselves being changed by modern life, although how that will play out is unclear. Iturbide is also keenly aware of the basic social justice issues - in particular the great disparities in wealth and class - that face Mexico, and while she doesn't hit her audience over the head with them, you can see them at work in her images.

Finally, I really enjoy just looking at the images and studying her technique, which is quite varied. She uses different kinds of lighting for different effects. She uses both candid and composed "people" shots. She creates evocative still lifes from the everyday objects in the lives of the people she's working with. She really does it all.