Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide: Photographs from The Wittliff Collections/Texas State University

November 18, 2023–February 17, 2024

The Museum of the Big Bend partnered with The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University to exhibit 58 black and white photographs by Graciela Iturbide.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) is considered one of the world’s finest contemporary photographers. While studying cinematography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico in 1969, she took a still photography class with Manuel Álvarez Bravo and then became his assistant for the next year and a half. In 1978, Iturbide was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population. Iturbide decided to document and record the way of life of the Seri Indians, a group of fishermen living a nomadic lifestyle in the Sonoran desert in northwest Mexico, along the border with Arizona. In 1979, she began her series on the culture of the Zapotecs of Juchitán—in particular the women—for which she received the Eugene Smith Award in 1987.

Her work, which fuses her interest in traditional culture with a contemporary vision that reveals the symbolic power of images, has gained her enormous recognition in Mexico and all over the world. She has been honored with significant awards, including the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Award. Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (UT Press, 2006) was the ninth book in The Wittliff ’s Southwestern & Mexican Photography Series. In 2019, Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, a major retrospective exhibition, opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Wittliff house 260 images by Iturbide, one of the largest collections of her work in the U.S. She currently lives in Mexico City.

Images (top to bottom): Self Portrait at My House, Angel Woman

Our Lady of Iguanas