The Brooklyn Rail

Treading the fine line between document and symbol and shot in a redolent black-and-white that imbues them with a stark, dramatic quality, Graciela Iturbide’s photographs portray a version of Mexico at once recognizable in its imagery and yet completely alien, almost beyond the realm of words. The eldest of thirteen siblings, Iturbide (b. 1942) got her start with photography relatively late in life when, after losing her daughter, she broke away from her conservative Catholic upbringing and marriage to pursue a degree in film. While studying at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), she became the studio assistant to Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002), one of the founding fathers of Latin American photography. Since then, she has been photographing Mexico through a series of highly specific and circumscribed series that nonetheless manage to speak about the country as a whole, almost by synecdoche. Graciela Iturbide: Shadowlines, currently on view at the Photographers’ Gallery, introduces and provides an overview of this oeuvre, in just under sixty-five photographs.

For the sake of completeness, the exhibition includes two bodies of work that are relatively less known. The whole of the back wall in the main room is taken up by photos belonging to the series “White Fence, East L.A.,” shot between 1986 and 1989 (later revisited in 2018 and 2019) for which Iturbide traveled to East Los Angeles and portrayed the lives of a Mexican street gang. Similarly, the smaller alcove at the back of the show is taken up by yet more recent work in which Iturbide progressively abandoned portraiture in favor of landscape photography that borders on abstraction. As exquisite as some of these individual photos are, on the whole they lack the magnetic thrust of Iturbide’s best and seem like a coda to an exhibition that would have felt complete even if it had focused solely on photographs produced in the 1970s and 1980s.

After a formative period, during which she worked through the trauma of loss in various images of death, Iturbide found her voice thanks to two trips that took her from Mexico City to the far ends of the country. In 1978, Iturbide was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to document the culture of the Seri people, fishermen leading a nomadic life in the Sonoran Desert. Roughly around the same time, Iturbide would be invited by her friend, artist Francisco Toledo (1940–2019), to his native Juchitán, Oaxaca, to photograph the Zapotec people and their matriarchal society. Iturbide’s two trips culminated in her two most iconic bodies of work and the photo books Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) (1981) and Juchitán de las mujeres [The Women of Juchitán] (1989). These projects take center stage in the current exhibition. The viewer gets a good look at the most famous photograph of each series: Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert) (1979), depicting a Seri woman striding through a desert landscape carrying a stereo, and Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), Juchitán, Oaxaca (1979), showing a street vendor balancing eight reptiles on her head. But they also get a sense of both series as a whole.

Manuel, Sonoran Desert, Mexico and Angelita (Angel Child), Sonora Desert (both 1979)—the two other photographs from Los que viven en la arena that are on view—are both medium close-ups, one of a young man sporting a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses staring defiantly into the distance, and the other of a black-veiled elderly woman wearing traditional attire who looks directly at the camera. What both portraits emphasize most clearly is a fundamental opacity or refusal of psychological access, a challenging quality that is formally dramatized by the high contrast of the images. Although they are devoid of all voyeuristic quality, I was reminded of Richard Avedon’s staged portraits of working class Texans in In The American West.

Conversely, the works that belong to Juchitán de las mujeres, the result of a decade of sustained engagement with and immersion in the way of life of the Zapotec, are characterized by a kind of immediacy and even tenderness. That said, some of the photos play with a sense of foreboding and death imagery—the highlight here is provided by the photograph Los pollos (Chickens), Juchitán, Oaxaca (1979), which depicts an elderly woman carrying a chicken while walking past a wall covered in dripping paint that could easily be blood. There are also quite a few images, like Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, that unsettle the boundary between man and beast in typically surrealist fashion. A surprising number of works of the series, however, consist of gentle portraits in which the subject is simply allowed to be themself. This is especially clear in those works where the temptation to exoticize and objectify might be strongest, such as Iturbide’s particularly sensitive depictions of muxe, a “third gender” who although born with male genitalia take on various feminine characteristics and traditionally have a prominent role in Zapotec society.

We live in a time duly suspicious of fixed identities and master narratives. Indeed, one could question the ethics of a white photographer from the metropole chasing after images of a “timeless” Mexico through representations of its indigenous people. Still, as much as Iturbide’s photographs riff on some familiar signifiers and tropes (they could well serve as illustrations for Juan Rulfo’s magical realist masterpiece Pedro Páramo), they are never exploitatively picturesque, but rather feel like a door onto an altered, dreamlike reality. The landscapes and faces of Iturbide’s images stimulate our imagination, and their mystery urges us to keep looking.