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Unmasking Mexico: The Photography of Graciela Iturbide
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23765 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 2004 |
2,046 Words |
| Author
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Susan Tenaglia
Susan Tenaglia, currently based in New York City, is a dance
writer, critic, and historian. |
The photographic camera is an excuse to participate in people's lives, in their rhythm, and in the simplicity of their festivities and to discover my country," internationally renowned Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has said. She views photography as a process of understanding or seeing her world. Her expansive, complex vision of her native country is revealed in the exquisite photographs she's produced over the last three decades and in her photo-essays Those Who Live in Sand (1981), Juchitán of Women (1989), and In the Name of the Father (1993). Her major retrospective Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit, released in 1996, depicts the richness of her Mexican culture from the indigenous communities of the Sonora Desert and Juchitán to the barrios of Los Angeles and the urban life of Mexico City. She has also made photographic journeys throughout India and the United States.
Iturbide works as an anthropologist does, living among a community, befriending its women and children, and sharing in their daily chores and annual festivities. She enters the sacred and intimate world of cemeteries, healings, marketplaces, and homes. Slowly, patiently, she documents the mystery of daily life and the "poetic dimensions of men." She depicts the dirty face of a child-angel making her way by foot to heaven, a cemetery clouded by locusts and mist, a woman in East L.A. demonstrating gang signals while standing in front of a mural honoring the heroes of the Mexican Revolution. In Fifteen, (1986), a young girl wearing a festive gown gazes boldly at the camera from a room in her house in Juchitán. The house is almost bare, its walls peeling paint. An old woman sits in a corner, staring into space. In the background, a boy stares through a barred window. The image is several photographs in one. The contradictions are blatant; the girl's
... (1999 of 12762 Characters)
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