Opening Tuesday, September 20th 2022, Etherton Gallery will present a selected survey of photographs by Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942, Mexico). The first major exhibition of the photographer’s work in Tucson, Graciela Iturbide: Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración (Dreams, Symbols and Storytelling), includes 30 iconic and recent images from the photographer’s five-decade career. The exhibition includes images of rural and urban Mexico, cityscapes and religious sites in India, the Chicano community in Los Angeles, birds, and recent landscapes from Japan. A selection of photographs documenting the impact of the Cuban Revolution (1954-1974), from The Cuban Collection, will accompany Iturbide’s work.
On Saturday, September 24, from 7-10 pm, Graciela Iturbide will attend the opening reception for Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración at Etherton Gallery, 340 South Convent Avenue, in downtown Tucson. The opening will feature live music by the Matt Mitchell Trio.
“Graciela Iturbide is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential contemporary photographers today, and I am proud to present the first significant exhibition of her work in Tucson,” said Terry Etherton, President of Etherton Gallery.
A limited number of signed copies of Graciela Iturbide’s recent exhibition catalogues and books will be available for purchase including: Heliotropo 37, (exhibition catalogue, Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2022); Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico (exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019); and the illustrated graphic novel, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2017). To pre-order a signed book, please call Etherton Gallery at (520) 624-7370 with a credit card.
Etherton Gallery and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) have arranged for Graciela Iturbide to give a public lecture in response to her five-decade career on Friday, September 23, 2022, at 5:30 pm, at the CCP. Admission is free. The Center for Creative Photography is located on the campus of the University of Arizona, at 1030 North Olive Road. For information about the lecture, contact the CCP at (520) 621-7968 or info@ccp.arizona.edu.
Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración underscores Graciela Iturbide’s deeply personal vision, which is informed by the fundamental belief in photography as a medium of internal and external exploration, her embrace of indigenous cultures, an openness to chance, and her ability “to fit into the different rhythms of the worlds that [she] photograph[s].”
“Photographs emerge from exterior realities and our inner selves – from within and without. They cross our paths, but we also carry them. This is why I believe photography is largely a matter of self-discovery. When I look at the images I have made, I see not only fragments of the world I have been able to capture, often by chance, but also observe the imprint of my interpretations, projections, desires and dreams.”
Graciela Iturbide: On Dreams, Symbols and Imagination (Aperture, 2022)
One of the highlights of the exhibition, Mujer ángel (Angel Woman), Desierto de Sonora, 1979, is a dream-like image of an indigenous Seri woman in a long skirt carrying a boom box, as she makes her way through a compressed Sonoran Desert landscape. The juxtaposition of the portable boom box, a late 1970s symbol of urban, African American and Latinx street culture, with the Seri woman’s adaptation of the boom box for use in the desert, where no reception is available, operates as a comment on gender and indigenous culture. It also implicitly addresses political disparities and the layered complexity of Mexican culture, creating a powerful statement about Mexican identity.
This is just one example of the many richly allusive images to be seen in Graciela Iturbide: Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración.
For more information, please contact Etherton Gallery at (520) 624-7370 or by email at info@ethertongallery.com. High resolution images are available to the press.
Graciela Iturbide
Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969, at the age of 27, she enrolled at the film school Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to become a film director. However, she was soon drawn to the art of still photography as practiced by the Mexican modernist master Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was teaching at the University. From 1970 to 1971, she worked as Bravo’s assistant, accompanying him on various photographic journeys throughout Mexico. In the early half of the 1970s, Iturbide traveled widely across Latin America—in particular to Cuba and Panama. In 1978, she 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 people along the country’s border with Arizona. In 1979, she was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This series resulted in the publication of her book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Between 1980 and 2000, Iturbide was invited to work in Cuba, Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France and the United States, producing a number of important projects.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and/or traveling retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), J. Paul Getty Museum (2007), MAPFRE Foundation, Madrid (2009), Photography Museum Winterthur (2009), Barbican Art Gallery, London (2012), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2022, among others.
Iturbide is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Foundation Award (1987); the Grand Prize Mois de la Photo, Paris (1988); a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Fiesta y Muerte (1988); the Hugo Erfurth Award, Leverkusen, Germany (1989); the International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan (1990); the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Award, Arles (1991); the Hasselblad Award (2008); the National Prize of Sciences and Arts in Mexico City (2008); an Honorary Degree in photography from Columbia College, Chicago (2008); and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2009).
Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are in the permanent collections of several public institutions among them: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée National d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; MAPFRE Foundation, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Photography, Hokkaido, Japan; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
