GRACIELA ITURBIDE
'The Inner Eye'
28 Nov 2009 - 7 Feb 2010
Fotomuseum Winterthur

An accompanying catalogue will
be published.

Traditional and modern culture in Latin America

The Mexican Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) will present her work from the last 40 years, especially about Mexico's reality between traditional and modern culture with mostly black and white documentary photography under the title 'The Inner Eye' at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich (CH). Graciela Iturbide is known for her work on portraying stigmatised ethnic groups and her focus on feminism.

fig.: Graciela Iturbide 'El baño de Frida' (Frida’s Bathroom), Coyoacán, México, 2006. Gelatin-silver print 35 x 35 cm. © Graciela Iturbide. In 2006, she became the first person who was allowed to enter the bathroom of Frida Kahlo, which Diego Rivera had closed up after the death of his wife in 1954.

Graciela Iturbide works since the 1960s as photographer. She saved with her documentary photography the view on the cultures - the traditional and the modern - of the Seri Indians of the Sonora Desert. The photograph Mujer ángel (Angel Woman) on this page, shows a Seri Indian with her back to us, walking through the desert carrying a radio recorder.

fig.: Graciela Iturbide 'Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora' (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), México, 1979. Gelatin-silver print 32 x 48 cm. Collection Mapfre Foundation © Graciela Iturbide.

Graciela Iturbide has studied cinematography at the National University of Mexico in the late 1960s. During this time she has attended lectures by the famous photographer Manuel Àlvarez Bravo, who inspired her. Later she became his assistant. She is influenced by the work of artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Frida Kahlo, or Diego Rivera. She was awarded several times. Recently - in 2008, she received the Hasselblad Award. She is a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography.

Graciela 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," publishes Texas State’s Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography online. The Wittliff Gallery holds the largest collection of Graciela Iturbide photographs in the United States.

Video: Slighshow about the work of photographer Graciela Iturbide, collected by the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas. Posted on 23 October 2009 by the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).


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