Text by Kristen Gresh. Contributions by Guillermo Sheridan.
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.
"Iguanas," Juchitán,1984, is reproduced from 'Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
British Journal of Photography
Charlotte Jansen
Graciela Iturbide projects her vision of Mexico: a country of political, religious, social, cultural and economic pluralities and tensions. A place where contrasts present themselves at every turn – sometimes harmonious, sometimes tense.
New York Times: Photo Lens Blog
Evelyn Nieves
Graciela Iturbide may be one of the most renowned photographers working today. Five decades into her journey with a camera, her work, most famously in indigenous communities in her native Mexico, has achieved that rare trifecta — admired by critics, revered by fellow photographers and adored by the public.
Wall Street Journal
William Meyers
The people who inhabit “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” are invariably presented with dignity, however extraordinary their rituals and animating tics; they persevere in a land of intense sunlight, dark shadows and whirring birds.
Artsy
Elyssa Goodman
Iturbide has spent a life finding the fantastical amongst the ordinary.
Guardian
Jo Tuckman
Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, a new book that accompanies an exhibition of the same name currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston... includes her best-known work from the extended periods she spent in indigenous communities 40-odd years ago.
Photoweenie
Jim Fitts
The Fact That Graciela Will Not Photograph Anyone Without Their Consent, And That She Spends A Good Amount Of Time With Her Subjects Is Very Evident. Her Understanding Of The Culture And People Translates Into Every Photograph.
Aesthetica
Tapping in to ideas of community, the poetic images expand on the genre of documentary photography to offer symbolic representations of life in Mexico and the US.
Flaunt
Tate Dillow
Taken together, her images present a full-bodied portrait of her home country, shining light on a land under constant transformation.
Feature Shoot
Miss Rosen
In Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico we enter into Iturbide’s realm — a world that is rich with raw, intense, visceral sensations of life and death.
Bookforum
Kate Sutton
"Graciela Iturbide's Mexico" plumbs the wells of mexicanidad as captured by the lens of Iturbide.
FAD
Paul Carey-Kent
[Iturbide] often makes what may be perfectly everyday seem simultaneously otherwise.
ARTFIXdaily
It is the empathy expressed by Iturbide and the deft juxtaposition of locations and subjects that makes Iturbide’s work so fascinating to view.
What Will You Remember?
Elin Spring
“Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” is a broad and passionate retrospective of four decades spent elucidating the complex and colorful Mexican culture.
New Yorker
Stephania Taladrid
In the course of her half-century-long career, Iturbide has made a case for seeing oneself in the other.
Brooklyn Rail
Sara Roffino
Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are the sorts of images that sear themselves into the mind, the subjects of her portraits becoming familiar figures around which one can imagine entire lives. It’s a generous sort of intimacy she creates, giving viewers depths and details but leaving space to wonder.
New York Review of Books
Christopher Alessandrini
As a perpetual guest, Iturbide became a master of the threshold, of doorways and frames, storefront windows and cemeteries, masks and carnival, of the moments preceding and following transformation.
"Chalmita" (1982) is reproduced from Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, published to accompany the landmark retrospective currently on view at MFA Boston. "Iturbide's photographs go beyond documentary, anthropological and ethnographic photography to express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her country," Kirsten Gresh writes. "They capture everyday life and its cultures, rituals and religion. They also raise questions about Mexican culture and inequality in telling a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s, a country in constant transition, defined by tensions between urban and rural life and indigenous and modern life. Iturbide's emphasis on indigenous populations serves as a reminder of the paradox of Mexico, a nation extremely rich in natural resources, even home to one of the richest men in the world, and yet a place where half of the population lives in poverty. Iturbide's photographs question the politics of inequality in her native Mexico, among other incongruities, through her focus on the dualities of human presence and nature, the real and the unreal, and death and dreams." continue to blog
One of Graciela Iturbide's many photographs dealing with the Mexican embrace of Death in ritual culture, "Procession" ("Peregrinación"), Chalma, 1984, is reproduced from MFA Boston's substantial new catalog to the current show of Iturbide's Mexico photographs. Essayist Guillermo Sheridan quotes Octavio Paz: "Death is present in our fiestas, our games, our loves and our thoughts. To die and to kill are ideas that rarely leave us. We are seduced by death. The fascination it exerts over us is the result, perhaps, of our hermit-like solitude and of the fury with which we break out of it. The pressure of our vitality, which can only express itself in forms that betray it, explains the deadly nature, aggressive or suicidal, of our explosions. When we explode we touch against the highest point of that tension, we graze the very zenith of life. And there, at the height of our frenzy, suddenly we feel dizzy; it is then that death attracts us." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 9.25 in. / 240 pgs / 135 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $69.95 GBP £35.00 ISBN: 9780878468584 PUBLISHER: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston AVAILABLE: 2/19/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Kristen Gresh. Contributions by Guillermo Sheridan.
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.
