Graciela Iturbide

Long dark hair, indigenous clothing and a radio recorder in his right hand. It's 1979 and a Seri indigenous woman walks in front of the Sonoran Desert, her back to the camera. The camera belongs to Graciela Iturbide, the most relevant figure in Mexican photography, who took the shutter to make Angel Woman. That emblematic photo is to this day his favorite, where he says he would live if he could live in one of its images.  

Angel Woman It is one of the more than ninety photos that gives life to the Graciela Iturbide Photographs exhibition. Curator Cristina Alemparte selected classic images from six of her first series, along with fifty photos from the series. Natural and Frida's bathroom, where she portrays prostheses, corsets, crutches and other objects that the painter's bathroom kept during the 50 years that it was closed.

Iturbide (1942) has won more than fifteen international awards, including the respected Hasselblad Prize, and has exhibited in places such as the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Barbican Art Gallery in London. This exhibition comes to GAM thanks to the collaboration of the Gonzalo Rojas Ibero-American Studies Foundation, the Council of Culture and the Arts and the Embassy of Mexico.

Do your dreams or nightmares look like your photos?
For me, sleep has always been very important in my work. I dream at night about what I did that day, I dream about things I'm going to do, I have premonitory dreams. Brassaï is one of the most decisive photographers in my life. For a long time, a phrase of his has inspired my work and it says: “Life can be captured neither by realism nor by naturalism, but only by the dream, the symbol or the imagination.”

How has your experience been as a woman photographer, both in the practice of the profession and in your view?
Fortunately for me, my work as a photographer has been very free. I worked in indigenous areas where they took care of me. Afterwards, my work is like a travel diary where I photograph what surprises me and that's how I make all my series.

How do you approach the process of taking a photo?
Photography is a ritual for me. Go out with the camera, observe, take the most mythologized part of man, enter the dark, reveal, choose the symbolic.