Photographer Graciela Iturbide: ‘Working with my heart is the only rule – nothing else’ | Photography

If you’re in any respect accustomed to modern Latin American images, you’ve most likely encountered the unforgettable picture of a Zapotec lady topped with stay iguanas, radiating quiet, unshakable dignity. Captured in 1979 by Graciela Iturbide, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán was neither deliberate nor staged. It was taken on impulse, guided by the artist’s intuition and deep respect for her topic, and has since turn out to be a touchstone of Mexican visible tradition and feminist images.

“What drives my work is surprise, wonder, dreams, and imagination,” Iturbide lately informed the Guardian.

Indeed, shock has been the animating power behind her complete profession. Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Iturbide was in her late 20s, married and elevating three kids, when she heard a radio advert for the Center for Cinematographic Studies on the Universidad Autónoma de México. On a whim, she utilized and, beneath the mentorship of the legendary photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, started a journey that will set up her as one among Latin America’s most revered photographers.

Iturbide’s pictures inhabit the house between doc and dream. They are grounded in actuality but imbued with poetic sensibility, revealing the mysteries of on a regular basis life. Her most celebrated works seize the spirit of communal life and Indigenous traditions in Mexico, whereas her sequence taken overseas in international locations similar to Cuba, India, Argentina, and the United States additionally maintain a major place inside her huge physique of labor. At 83, Iturbide stays an important power in images, she’s been the recipient of the Hasselblad and the William Klein Award, and earlier this yr she was honored with the Premio Princesa de Asturias.

Until January 2026, the International Center of Photography in New York will current Graciela Iturbide: Serious Play, a career-spanning exhibition of almost 2 hundred works drawn from Fundación MAPFRE’s in depth assortment. The present presents a uncommon alternative to expertise the total breadth of her imaginative and prescient — from early portraits to later meditations on panorama — most rendered in black and white, the visible language she has embraced since her adolescence learning with Álvarez Bravo.

“Color feels unreal to me,” Iturbide mentioned. “I work in black and white, I dream in black and white, I photograph in black and white because it is an abstraction of everything.”

Far from monotonous, her monochrome pictures pulse with depth and soul, the results of an intimate and immersive method. To doc Indigenous communities, Iturbide has lived amongst her topics, participated of their day by day routines and rituals, and constructed belief over months and generally years, as she did whereas creating her lauded ebook of pictures Juchitán de las Mujeres (1979–86), to which she devoted almost a decade.

In 1978, a fee from Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute took Iturbide to the Sonoran Desert, the place she photographed the Seri folks, nomadic fishermen striving to protect their ancestral traditions. From this challenge emerged Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (1979), {a photograph}, on present on the ICP, which the artist describes as a present from the desert itself, as she will be able to’t recall the precise second she captured it, a testomony to the profound and intuitive relationship she maintains with the locations and folks she pictures.

While numerous parts of Indigenous Mexican communities, their rituals and festivals, wildlife, and sweeping landscapes, function prominently in Iturbide’s oeuvre, portraits of girls, similar to Vendedora de zácate, Oaxaca, México (1974), have remained a central and resonant focus all through her apply.

“Do you know why my photos of women have traveled the world? Because I’ve lived with them, gone to the market, sold jitomates with them, and slept in their houses. They become my collaborators. It’s my way of creating camaraderie, a sense of complicity,” she explains. “I always photograph with the consent and collaboration of the people.”

The iconic portrait of the lady topped with iguanas additionally emerged from this method. “I would sit with the women at the market so they could get to know me, and I would accompany them to sell their chickens and iguanas,” Iturbide recalled. “All of a sudden, I saw this woman carrying live iguanas on her head and asked to photograph her. I only had one roll of film, and of the twelve frames I took, all were in motion and she was laughing, except one, which captured her dignity. Now there is a large sculpture of her in a plaza in Juchitán, where countless political demonstrations take place. They’ve made small clay figurines of her, embroidered her image on huipiles, and she even appears in murals in Los Angeles and San Francisco. This photo didn’t ask for my permission; she wants to soar, and that’s fine, it’s fine that she goes wherever she wants.”

While spontaneity performs a central position in Iturbide’s apply, her work can also be rooted in cautious preparation and respect for the folks and cultures she pictures. “I never work with scripts. I only capture what emerges by surprise, that is, what my eyes see and my heart feels, but I always read extensively about the places I’m visiting and I speak with the elders so they can share their stories and gradually help me form my understanding of their culture,” she defined.

This stability between instinct and intention extends into her studio, the place growing movie unfolds as a quiet ritual. “After photographing, I return home. I still work with film: I develop it, review the contact sheets, and organize them. For me, it is a ritual, arriving, examining my negatives, and selecting them,” she mentioned. This deliberate course of mirrors the contemplative nature of her pictures, revealing the reverence on the core of her apply.

Iturbide’s self-portraits, a number of of which can be on view on the ICP, additionally come up from her instinctive impulse. “I never prepare my self-portraits; it’s something that happens in the moment, usually when I’m in a bit of a crisis,” she defined. “For instance, in Eyes to Fly With?, Coyoacán, Mexico (1991), a hummingbird had come into my house and died. I was in a crisis, wondering if I would continue photographing, so I quickly went to the market, bought a live one, and placed both on my eyes, all in a very unconscious way.”

In current years, as safety issues have made photographing in Mexico’s rural cities more and more tough, Iturbide’s focus has additional shifted past Indigenous communities to incorporate landscapes, nature, and broader reflections on humanity throughout totally different international locations. “In some ways, I think I’m now turning my attention to the origin of humankind,” she mentioned. Still, her apply stays as spontaneous and heart-centered as ever. “I may be wrong, but I don’t have rules,” she mentioned. “Working with my heart is the only rule – nothing else.”