Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) is one of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, whose work goes beyond documentary photography to express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native Mexico.

Iturbide’s photographs capture everyday life and its cultures, rituals and religions, while also raising questions about Mexican society and inequality. They tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s—a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich syncretism. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, rituals, challenges and contradictions. 

This is the first major East Coast presentation of Iturbide’s work, featuring approximately 125 photographs that span her five-decade-long career. Organized into nine sections, the exhibition opens with early photographs, followed by three series focused on three of Mexico’s many indigenous cultures. Photographed over the course of 10 years, Juchitán captures the essential role of women in Zapotec culture. Los que viven en la arena ( Those Who Live in the Sand) concentrates on the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert, while La Mixteca documents elaborate goat-slaughtering rituals in Oaxaca, serving as critical commentary on the exploitation of workers. Thematic sections highlight Iturbide’s explorations of various aspects and symbols of Mexican culture, including fiestas, death and mortality, and birds and their symbolism. The two most recent series on view also relate to Mexico’s cultural and artistic heritage. They feature the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens, representing plants—mainly cacti—in intensive care, and El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), depicting personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul, which had been locked away for 50 years after the artist’s death. 

Drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection, “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” also includes the Museum’s recent acquisition of 37 works by the artist, as well as loans from museums and private collections throughout the US and Mexico.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website