CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/3/2019

Celebrate Women's History with this landmark survey of Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico photographs

"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."