Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico: Photographs

The first book to focus on Graciela Iturbide’s photographs of Mexico, capturing all of its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.

Graciela Iturbide, best known for iconic photographs of indigenous women of Mexico, has engaged with her homeland as a subject for the past fifty years in images of great variety and depth. The intensely personal, lyrical photographs collected and interpreted in this book show that, for her, photography is a way of life – as well as a way of seeing and understanding Mexico, with all its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.

The Mexico portrayed here is a country in constant transition, defined by tensions between urban and rural life, and indigenous and modern life. Iturbide’s deep connection with her subjects – among them political protests, celebrations and rituals, desert landscapes, cities, places of burial – produces indelible images that encompass dreams, symbols, reality, and daily life.

This volume presents more than a hundred beautifully reproduced black-and-white photographs, accompanied by illuminating essays inviting readers to share in Graciela Iturbide’s personal artistic journey through the country she knows so intimately.

Table of Contents

Director’s Foreword • Introduction: Dreams on Paper • Early Work • The Seri • Juchitán •
La Mixteca • Fiestas • Death • Birds • Botanical Garden • Frida Kahlo’s Bathroom • Paths,
Frontiers, Mirrors – Guillermo Sheridan • Notes