Biography

Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico in 1942, the eldest of thirteen children. She then married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz

Manuel Rocha Díaz

Manuel Rocha Diaz was a Mexican architect.He was born in Mexico City in 1936 and died in 1996. He graduated in 1961 at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico where he studied with Augusto H. Álvarez. In 1960 he spent three months in Japan where he had a big influence on Japanese traditional...

 in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years. Iturbide's six year old daughter died in 1970; after this death she turned to photography. She studied at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos

Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos

Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos was founded in 1963 as part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It was influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and by the First Contest of Experimental Film organized in Mexico that year....

 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she met her mentor, the teacher, cinematographer and photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican photographer.Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He came from a family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera...

.

Iturbide photographs everyday life, almost entirely in black-and-white. She was inspired by the photography of Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka is a Czech photographer.-Biography:Josef Koudelka was born in 1938 in Boskovice, Moravia, town of about 10,000 inhabitants. He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6 x 6 Bakelite camera...

, Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...

, Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist.-Biography:Salgado was born on February 8, 1944 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in...

 and Álvarez Bravo. She became interested in the daily life of Mexico's indigenous cultures and has photographed life in Mexico City, Juchitán, Oaxaca and on the Mexican/American border (La Frontera.)

In 1979, Iturbide was asked by a man to photograph his village. Interested by the proposal, Iturbide released her first collection, titled "Mujer Ángel" ("Angel Woman") and shot in Mexico's portion of the Sonoran desert

Sonoran Desert

The Sonoran Desert is a North American desert which straddles part of the United States-Mexico border and covers large parts of the U.S. states of Arizona and California and the northwest Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. It is one of the largest and hottest...

. Her first experience as a photographer shaped Iturbide's views on life, making her a strong supporter of feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

. The image of "Mujer Ángel" was used by the politically charged metal group Rage Against The Machine

Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California. Formed in 1991, the group's line-up consists of vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist and backing vocalist Tim Commerford, guitarist Tom Morello and drummer Brad Wilk...

 for their single "Vietnow

Vietnow

"Vietnow" was the final single for Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire album. Officially it is only the third single from the album, as "Down Rodeo" was a promo release only....

" in 1997.

Some of the inspiration for her next work came from her support of feminist causes. Her well known collection, "Señora de Las Iguanas", ("Our Lady of the Iguanas") was shot in Juchitán, Oaxaca, a city where women dominated town life. Her work in Juchitán was not only about women, however: she also shot "Magnolia", a photo of a man wearing a dress and looking at himself on a mirror. It was "Magnolia" that has led many photography experts to say that Iturbide also explored sexuality among Mexicans with her work.

Iturbide has also photographed Mexican Americans in the White Fence barrio of East Los Angeles as part of the documentary book "A Day in the Life of America" (1987). She has worked in Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 (during 1996), India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 (where she shot another well known photo of hers, "Perros Perdidos", or "Lost Dogs"), and the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, where she did her last known work, an untitled collection of photos shot in Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

.

She is a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in many major museum collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The largest collection of original prints in the United States is located at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University.

She continues to live and work in Coyoacán, Mexico.

She has won the W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith

William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.- Life and work :...

 prize for photography (1987), a first prize award from France's Mois de la Photo, and a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 (1988). In 2008 she received the Hasselblad Foundation

Hasselblad Foundation

The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation, established in 1979, is a fully independent, not-for-profit foundation. The main aim of the Foundation is to promote research and academic teaching in the natural sciences and photography. The Foundation also presents an annual international award in...

 Photography Award.

In awarding her the 2008 Hasselblad Foundation award, the Foundation said:

Graciela Iturbide is considered one of the most important and influential Latin American photographers of the past four decades. Her photography is of the highest visual strength and beauty. Graciela Iturbide has developed a photographic style based on her strong interest in culture, ritual and everyday life in her native Mexico and other countries. Iturbide has extended the concept of documentary photography, to explore the relationships between man and nature, the individual and the cultural, the real and the psychological. She continues to inspire a younger generation of photographers in Latin America and beyond.

Her work is represented in the United States by the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, the Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe and Throckmorton Fine Arts in New York City.

The largest institutional collection of Graciela Iturbide photographs in the United States is preserved at the Wittliff collections

Wittliff collections

The Wittliff Collections, located on the seventh floor of the Albert B. Alkek Library at Texas State University, was founded by William D. Wittliff in 1987...

, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX.

Exhibitions

Graciela Iturbide has had many exhibitions of her work in different parts of the world, starting in 1980. Here is a list of a few of her exhibitions:

• 1980, "Graciela Iturbide", New Mexico
  New Mexico
  New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
  
  .
• 1988, Latina, an En Foco exhibition at DCA City Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1990, "External Encounters, Internal Imaginings: The Photographs of Graciela Iturbide", at the Museum of Modern Art
  Museum of Modern Art
  The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
  
   in San Francisco, California
  San Francisco, California
  San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
  
  .
• 1997-1998, "Images of Spirit" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Philadelphia Museum of Art
  The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
  
  , Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
  
  .
• 2003, "Pajaros et Paisajes" ("Birds and Sights"), Robert Miller Gallery, New York city.
• 2003, "Pajaros et Paisajes", OMG Gallery for Contemporary Art, Düsseldorf
  Düsseldorf
  Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
  
  , Germany
  Germany
  Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
  
  .
• 2007-2008, "The Goat's Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide", J. Paul Getty Museum
  J. Paul Getty Museum
  The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...
  
  
• 2011, Rencontres d'Arles Festival, France.
• 2011, Retrospective, Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil

Literature

• Images of the spirit. (1996) New York, Aperture Foundation. ISBN 0-89381-681-7
• La Forma y la Memoria (1996) ("Form and Memory")
• Iturbide, G., & Bradu, F. (2006). Eyes to fly with: portraits, self-portraits, and other photographs. Wittliff Gallery series. Austin, University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-71462-9
• Iturbide. (2003) tf. editores, Madrid. ISBN 84-96209-48-2

Further reading

• Gili, M. (2006). Graciela Iturbide. London, Phaidon. ISBN 0-7148-4570-1
• Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1980). 7 portafolios Mexicanos: exposición por diversos países, Centro Cultural de México, abril-mayo de 1980. UNAM
  Unam
  UNAM or UNaM may refer to:* National University of Misiones, a National University in Posadas, Argentina*National Autonomous University of Mexico , the large public autonomous university based in Mexico City...
  
  Difusión Cultural - in Spanish

External links

• Iturbide´s images in Literal
• http://www.artnet.com/ag/fulltextsearch.asp?searchstring=graciela+iturbide Artnet.com
• http://www.jordanelgrably.com/gracielaiturbide.html Profile of Iturbide commissioned by El Paseante.
• http://www.edelmangallery.com/iturbide.htm Edelman Gallery
• http://www.rosegallery.net/iturbide/index.html Rose Gallery, Santa Monica
• http://throckmorton-nyc.com/PhotoContemp/html/iturbide.html Throckmorton Fine Arts, New York, NY
• http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/iturbide/ The Goat's Dance at the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Graciela Iturbide´s Official Website
• The Wittliff Collections of Southwestern and Mexican Photography, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX