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The first book to focus on Graciela Iturbide's photographs of Mexico, capturing all of its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.
Graciela Iturbide, best known for iconic photographs of indigenous women of Mexico, has engaged with her homeland as a subject for the past fifty years in images of great variety and depth. The intensely personal, lyrical photographs collected and interpreted in this book show that, for her, photography is a way of life - as well as a way of seeing and understanding Mexico, with all its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.
The Mexico portrayed here is a country in constant transition, defined by tensions between urban and rural life, and indigenous and modern life. Iturbide's deep connection with her subjects - among them political protests, celebrations and rituals, desert landscapes, cities, places of burial - produces indelible images that encompass dreams, symbols, reality, and daily life.
This volume presents more than a hundred beautifully reproduced black-and-white photographs, accompanied by illuminating essays inviting readers to share in Graciela Iturbide's personal artistic journey through the country she knows so intimately.
List of contents
Director's Foreword . Introduction: Dreams on Paper . Early Work . The Seri . Juchitán . La Mixteca . Fiestas . Death . Birds . Botanical Garden . Frida Kahlo's Bathroom . Paths, Frontiers, Mirrors - Guillermo Sheridan . Notes
About the author
Kristen Gresh is Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Summary
Iturbide is modern Mexico's subtlest, most profound chronicler
Graciela Iturbide, best known for her iconic photographs of Mexican indigenous women, has engaged with her homeland as a subject for the past 50 years in images of great variety and depth. The intensely personal, lyrical photographs collected and interpreted in this book show that, for Iturbide, photography is a way of life—as well as a way of seeing and understanding Mexico, with all its beauties, rituals, challenges and contradictions.
The Mexico portrayed here is a country in constant transition, defined by tensions and exchanges between new and old, urban and rural, traditional and modern. Iturbide’s deep connection with her subjects—among them political protests, celebrations and rituals, desert landscapes, cities, places of burial and Mexico’s artistic heritage—produces indelible images that encompass dreams, symbols, reality and daily life.
Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Iturbide’s work on the East Coast, this volume presents more than 100 beautifully reproduced black-and-white photographs, accompanied by illuminating essays inviting readers to share in Graciela Iturbide’s personal artistic journey through the country she knows so intimately.
One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) began studying photography in the 1970s with legendary photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Seeking “to explore and articulate the ways in which a vocable such as 'Mexico' is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices,” as she puts it, Iturbide has created a nuanced and sensitive documentary record of contemporary Mexico.
