GRACIELA ITURBIDE

With her black and white images GRACIELA ITURBIDE brings us the shadows of human existence. Traditions and their fragility, belief and religion, community and death are common themes for the artist. Within a five-decade career she has built an oeuvre that is fundamental for understanding the development of photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF) honours this icon of Latin American photography, who was born in 1942 in Mexico-City, with her first retrospective in Germany. The exhibition has been organised by Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, and in cooperation with the FFF highlights seminal works from all creative phases of this exceptional photographer.  

On view are early works such as her first major photographic project “Juchitán de las Mujeres” (The Women’s Juchitán), which was produced between 1979 and 1986. This documentation of the matriarchal community on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, made Iturbide renowned – and her characteristic picture language visible. The artist often creates images that seem to shift between the documentary and the lyrical, mirroring the diversity of life itself.   

To illustrate cultural tensions between two civilizations, for example the question how indigenous culture can continue to survive within western culture, Iturbide focused on the Seri, an indigenous group of the Sonoran Desert. Furthermore the FFF showcases portraits of the „White Fence“ gang members, from the 1980s in Los Angeles, intimate images made in the house of Frida Kahlo, as well as photographs of mythical gardens, landscapes and birds, which Iturbide created in her homeland and on her visual itinerary in countries such as India, Italy, Korea or Madagascar.