GRACIELA ITURBIDE
Nueve días de luto / Nine days of mourning
Primera communión / First Communion
Primer día del verano / First day of Summer
Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942. While studying cinematography at the National University of Mexico she took a still photography class with Manuel Álvarez Bravo and then became his assistant for the next year and a half. In 1979 she began her series on the culture of the Zapotecs—in particular the women—of Juchitán, for which she received the Eugene Smith Award in 1987. Her work, which fuses her interest in traditional culture with a contemporary vision revelatory of the symbolic power of images, has gained for her enormous recognition in Mexico and all over the world. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, the Hokkaido Prize in Japan in 1990, the Arles Photographic Prize in 1991. She has exhibited internationally at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris (1982), the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art (1988), the Austin Museum of Art (2000), the San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City (2002). Her most recent publication is Eyes To Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits and Other Photographs, from the Wittliff Gallery Series with UT Press. She was selected to photograph Rome by FotoGrafia - Rome’s International Festival–one of only five artists so far–and her photographs are on exhibit there in April 2007. Iturbide is considered one of the finest photographers worldwide. The Wittliff Gallery is proud to include over 225 photographs by Iturbide in our collection, the largest in the US.
PHOTO by Mauricio Rocha Iturbide