/mythical women with iguanas /
In her most famous photographs, Graciela Iturbide captured grand and graceful women. One of these she called Mujer Ángel (Woman Angel) and thus transformed her into a symbol of the Native American people of the Sonora desert in northern Mexico. We see the figure of a woman walking away from us along a steep slope towards a large desert horizon, softly backlit by the setting sun, dressed in a flowing long white skirt and holding a tape recorder. It is the tape deck that captures our interest and causes us to pay even more attention to her strange hurried ecstasy - it is a contrasting element, one which paradoxically makes her even more timeless and unreal. Punctum par excellence, one could say. Another Indian woman is depicted from a low angle; her expression could be described as superiority, if only it did not appear so unreal (or even surreal) - Nuestra senora de las iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas) is wearing a mad garland of live iguanas on her head. She is one of the ”children of tigers and other beasts“, in other words a member of the Zapotec tribe, which lives in the southern Mexican province of Oaxaca.Although Iturbide, one of the best-known female photographers of contemporary Mexico, draws on the local documentary tradition mixed with outside influences (among the main sources listed is Henri Cartier- Bresson, whose works Iturbide got to know in Paris), she is not afraid to use elements of staged photography, and her approach bears a strong resemblance to Poetism. She has always stressed the importance of form, which causes the image to resonate in our memory and thanks to which we remember a picture. Graciela Iturbide works exclusively in a black-and-white and extremely visually expressive style that can easily create images with symbolic value. She does not pursue a ”faithful“ representation of phenomena, which are always interwoven with various personal views and collective myths; she focuses on her own vision, through which she perceives and captures reality. She has recognised that Bresson's ”decisive moment“ clashes with her thoroughly mythical vision and that, rather than precisely and quickly capturing a moment, it is the general composition that is important for her. She tries to adjust her initial vision to what she sees, leaving the specific experience to continuously re-create itself anew. The result is a structure held together by the steadfastly lived, constantly self-renewing power of an imagined myth of beauty and grace and the conviction that it is necessary to re-discover and reveal this myth through photography.
Graciela Iturbide was born on 16 May 1942 in Mexico. In 1969, when she was already the mother of three children, she enrolled in film school (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, where photography soon became her sole focus; one decisive impetus came from Manuel Álvarez-Bravo, for whom she worked as an assistant and who helped awaken her interest in rural Mexico. Later, when at the request of Francisco Toledo she created a series of photos in Juchitán, Oaxaca. In 1979, she discovered her long-term theme in the area's peculiar pre-Hispanic native American culture. She also came to the clear conclusion that she preferred to work on photographic essays that came into existence over a longer period of time. Since the late 1970s, she has regularly stayed with ”Los Zapotecos“; her series Juchitán de las mujeres (Juchitán of the Women), published as a book in 1989, was born over a ten-year period during which she repeatedly visited the area. Like Francisco Toledo, who discovered his own Zapotec roots here and whose fantastic zoomorphic prints draw on local mythology, she was also so enamoured by this unique community that she wanted to become a part of it.
A fierce-looking woman with iguanas, a Juchitán vendor whom the photographer met at the marketplace, gazes out at an imagined distant horizon somewhere above the level of the shot. The other women in Iturbide's photographs have a similar gaze; they seem reserved in their own way, while at the same time giving off a self-assured pride. The female figures in flowing skirts radiate power and at the same time betray a certain inwardness. They are a part of the Zapotec's unique matriarchal culture, which has been able to resist outside influences(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)