CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/2/2019

We're celebrating Women's History Month with Graciela Iturbide

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."