Introduction

Highlighting works from its permanent collection by one of Mexico’s greatest photographers, the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography is honored to present Ojos para volar / Eyes to Fly With: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide, in concert with publication of the ninth volume in its award-winning book series, Iturbide’s Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs. Ojos para volar / Eyes to Fly With runs October 21, 2006 through March 18, 2007, at the Wittliff Gallery, on the seventh floor of the Alkek Library at Texas State University-San Marcos. For more information and directions go to the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography.

Graciela Iturbide

The oldest of 13 children, Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942. She studied filmmaking and scriptwriting at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from 1969 to 1972. It was there she met photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and, after enrolling in his basic photography class, worked for a year and a half as his assistant. He remained her friend and mentor until his death.

Iturbide has since developed her own interpretive photographic language. Her familiarity with Mexican culture is central to her art, and she’s taken that knowledge all over the world, photographing in the southern United States, Peru, India, Cuba, Spain, Panama, Japan, Russia, Ecuador, and Argentina. From immersing herself in the indigenous populations of the Zapotec in Juchitán and the Seris of the Sonora desert, to photographing girl gangs in Los Angeles and landscapes and objects in Texas and India, Iturbide looks for “surprise in ordinary things that I could have found anywhere in the world. The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves.”

In 1978, Iturbide became a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. Since then she has received numerous honors, among them the W. Eugene Smith Award (1987-88), a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (1988), the Gran Prix Mois (1988), and the Hokkaido Prize (1990).

Iturbide has been exhibited in many single artist and group shows, including: Juchitán, pueblo de nube / Juchitán, Cloud Village (Toured Argentina, England, Japan, 1987-1998); External Encounters, Internal Imaginings: The Photographs of Graciela Iturbide (Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1990); Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit (Retrospective, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1997-98); and Pajaros et Paisajes / Birds and Sights (Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, 2003, and OMG Gallery for Contemporary Art, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2003).

She has two grown sons—one an architect, one a composer; her only daughter died many years ago in childhood—and she counts among her friends many of the most illustrious members of the artistic community in Mexico. Graciela Iturbide has an international following, and is represented in the U.S. by a number of prestigious commercial galleries. Texas State’s Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography holds the largest archive of her work in the U.S.