Graciela Iturbide’s Private Universe September 24th, 2010 by Cassandra McGrath An ostrich stares indignantly at me, hip jutting out as though I had ditched its Thanksgiving dinner. “What are you doing in this gallery staring at me?” it seems to say. “Why didn’t you bring the cranberry sauce?” Like an exaggerated cartoon version of an image in National Geographic, the ostrich is one of the more vivid subjects in Graciela Iturbide’s most recent exhibition, Graciela Iturbide: asor, ending this week in the Rose Gallery at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Iturbide once said, “While using my camera I am, above all, an actress participating in the scene taking place at the moment, and the other actors know what role I play.” In “asor,” taken straight from her personal archive, Iturbide creates a fantasy world that explores the terror and joy of childhood solitude. Inspired by her grandchildren and Alice in Wonderland, Iturbide photographed the Southern United States, Italy, India and Mexico, using snippets from each location but nothing identifiable from any of them. Instead, she crafted a new narrative that makes the fantastic pedestrian and the pedestrian fantastic. Clocks and abandoned buildings take on the significance of mythical creatures. In one pair of photographs, two blank eyeholes carved out of rocks peer out at the viewer, observing and saying nothing. Birds gather ominously in the sky like locusts, and in one arresting image, sunflowers are backlit and shot from below, drooping and spiky as Venus Fly Traps. Iturbide plays with perspective: A giant plaster head sits next to a parked car, disorienting any sense of scale. A bell-shaped flower is photographed from the side, grossly distorted, its surface as smooth and shiny as porcelain. In one remarkable shot, a leopard lunges towards the camera, eyes shut, front legs crumpled in an awkward gait. The leopard looks as clumsy as a cartoon, with a viciously contorted face, like a living stuffed animal about to be killed. Iturbide photographs things with a childlike wonder and innocence, only distorted through a morbid prism. Her minutely crafted universe reveals her fascination with the coexistence of life and death, and the exquisite beauty of violence. Iturbide came late to photography, influenced by the surrealism and mysticism of Luis Buñuel and the indigenous people photographed by Manuel Alvarez Bravo. The last time I saw Iturbide’s photography was three years ago in a retrospective at the J. Paul Getty Muesum, and the images were grisly: dead pigs, strung-up birds, a woman clutching a knife in her mouth preparing a goat for slaughter. Iturbide is best known for her ethnographic images of the Zapotec people in Oaxaca, including her famed “Mujer Ángel,” in which an indigenous woman faces a fertile valley, casually holding a boombox. Despite the intrigue of Iturbide’s newest exhibition, I was drawn to much of her other work on display in the gallery. In 2006, Iturbide was allowed to photograph inside the estate of Frida Kahlo, and in one image, a pair of tiny, deformed-looking feet rest on the siding of a porcelain bathtub. The bathtub is Kahlo’s and the feet are Iturbide’s, appearing corpse-like. Several other images are more immediately arresting than her newer work, which is more quiet and restrained. But Iturbide’s willingness to explore new artistic territory demonstrates her continued relevance. Perhaps Iturbide deserves more recognition, which is difficult when her newer images are so private. Upon discovering her for the first time, the viewer is free to create a new reality, in which ostriches talk, flowers are monstruous, death is imminent, and life is more vivid than ever. Graciela Iturbide as Anthropological Photographer STANLEY BRANDES This article is a reflection on the images of Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. Focusing on her portraits of indigenous peoples of Mexico (particularly the Seri, Isthmus Zapotec, and Mixtec), the author addresses the anthropological value of a body of visual material that is artistic, rather than documentary, in conception and execution. The article inquires into whether and to what extent the images of a professional photographer such as Iturbide can be considered ethnographic. In essence, the author argues, Iturbide may be thought of as an anthropological photographer, given that her work is of educational and inspirational value to ethnographers of Mexico. [Key words: gender, indigenous identity, Mexico] raciela Iturbide is indisputably one of Latin photographyFon photographic expeditions. With support America’s most celebrated photographers, from A´ lvarez Bravo, she gradually became a professional G admired and respected not only for her artistry, photographer. but also for her ability to get close to her subjects and Iturbide’s first major project, initiated in 1974, was reveal aspects of their lives that would be inaccessible or the documentation of General Omar Torrijos’ attempt entirely invisible to the casual observer. Iturbide cannot to establish a left-wing regime in Panama. In 1978, be called an ethnographic, or even documentary, pho- together with Nacho Lo´pez, Mariana Yaompolsky, tographer. Because most of her photographic subjects and other well-known documentary photographers are posed, she can hardly be called a street photographer of Mexico, Iturbide received a commission from the either. And yet her photographsFparticularly those National Indigenous Institute of Mexico (INI) to name dealing with her native MexicoFcan prove extremely an Indian group of her own choosing and, working in interesting and informative to any scholar with a collaboration with a writer of her own choosing, produce concern for indigenous life. An exploration of Graciela a book about that group. Iturbide selected the Seri, a Iturbide’s Mexican photography calls into question group of some 500 seminomadic people in the Sonora the way photographers and visual anthropologists alike desert who were in the process of becoming entirely tend to classify imagery. Her work straddles genres of sedentary. The result of that project was a book entitled still photography as they are normally defined, thereby Los que viven en la arena (1981) (Those Who Live in the raising questions as to the kinds of imagery that anthro- Sand), which she produced in collaboration with an- pologists should consider relevant to their own research thropologist Luis Barjau. endeavors. The work also illuminates similarities and Following the Seri project, Iturbide began to devote differences between anthropological photographers and her photography to the remote, rural, mainly indigenous other image-makers who focus on powerless, marginal peoples of her own country. In carrying out this work, members of society, thereby validating their lives as she, as an elite urban Mexican, became virtually a tour- artistic or intellectually vibrant subjects. ist, or, more accurately, a quasi-anthropologist. Art critic Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide Cuaucte´moc Medina remarks that ‘‘Iturbide belongs to a began her career in film making. She even briefly acted generation of Mexican and Latin American photogra- in movies. In 1970, after Iturbide’s daughter died at the phers who reactivated a passion for the discipline in the age of six in an accident, she underwent a personal crisis, 1970s and 1980s, mostly from within so called ‘ethno- abandoned the world of film, and began accompanying graphic photography’ ’’ (Medina 2001:11). It is through Manuel A´ lvarez Bravo (1902–2002)Fdean of Mexican her work that the indigenous peoples who form the Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 24, Issue 2, pp. 95–102, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. & 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7458.2008.00007.x. 96 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 24 Number 2 Fall 2008 subjects of her main projectsFprincipally the Seri, the culture of the people portrayed in her images, it is virtu- Isthmus Zapotec, and the MixtecFreveal themselves to us. ally impossible to understand them from an ethnographic What seems curious about Iturbide’s Mexican pho- or anthropological point of view. tographic corpus is that it does not fit into the mold The way we understand and interpret documentary of documentary imagery. She has never attempted to photographs is through captions. Graciela Iturbide’s explore the entire way of life of a people or to reveal captions are short and often cryptic. They locate some hidden truth about them. Is it possible, then, to photographic subjects geographically and denote in learn something substantial about Mexican society from the simplest of fashions an object or a person figured in Graciela Iturbide’s photographs? Is she an ‘‘innate an- the image. But the captions offer no information that thropologist,’’ as some observers state (Medina 2001:3)? the viewer can rely upon to contextualize the unusual, Or is there something about her artistry that convinces frequently exotic portraits in any meaningful cultural viewers that her work is designed to instruct them about way. On the other hand, the artistic power of the images indigenous Mexico? stimulates the anthropological imagination. Iturbide’s Consider first the obvious conclusion: in terms of the pictures operate on an emotional, rather than intellectual, professional definition, Graciela Iturbide clearly is not an level. It is above all their affective impact that points to anthropologist. She possesses neither formal anthropo- something worth exploring from an ethnographic stand- logical training nor academic degrees in anthropology. point. Graciela’s photographs raise questions about the Nor is her approach to her subject anthropological. society and culture of her subjectsFquestions which Anthropologists pose questions of the world around them any serious ethnographer of Mexico, in particular, would and carry out systematic research in an attempt to answer want to explore. these questions. Anthropologists also build their argu- It is for this reason, and others, that I would say that ments through reference to published work that precedes Graciela Iturbide is, in fact, an ‘‘innate anthropologist.’’ their own.