Suspended between heaven and earth,'here and there'Elsewhere, the scorched earth and the sidewalks or the darkened clouds of'Birds, Graciela Iturbide's sharp and piercing eye has captured the strangeness of the world. This eye, with its'ambush'incongruous, poetry lurking in the'ordinary, has shaken the boundaries of documentary photography,'leaning towards the world of chimeras, towards a magical and visionary realism.
A major figure in Latin American photography, trained in the 1970s by Manuel Àlvarez Bravo, winner of the Hasselblad Award in 2008, the Mexican photographer is the subject of a vast retrospective at the Cartier Foundation bringing together more than 200 images, from "iconic" works to the most recent photographs, including a color series (made especially for the exhibition) which stands out in her black and white work captivated by "forms, lights and shadows".
"J'I looked for surprise in the'ordinary, an ordinary that I'could have found n'no matter where else," explains the one who gave an extra touch of soul to Those who live in the sand (Those who live in the sand, a series made in 1978 within the Seri community, among the Indians of the Sonoran Desert), but also to cholos, Chicanos deaf-mute people of the western United States (White Fence Gang, 1986-1989), and who immortalized the women of Juchitán, heirs to the Zapotec culture, in the Oaxaca Valley in Mexico.
Surprise and the unusual will therefore be his driving force, his compass, throughout all his travels, in Mexico but also in Germany, Spain, Ecuador, Japan, the United States, India, Madagascar, Argentina, Peru, Panama – between the 1970s and the 1990s.
“Photography is a ritual for me. Going out with my camera, observing, capturing the most mythical part of the'man, then enter the'darkness, develop, choose the symbolic, declares Graciela Iturbide. One also understands the strange power emanating from her photographs, which far surpass documentary photography in their symbolic scope, their "mythical" aura, and their "uncanny strangeness"... Her famous Our Lady of the Iguanas crowned with (live) iguanas, she has the timeless gaze and bearing of a queen; as does her young daughter in Zapotec costume, and all the indigenous women and men she immortalized: hieratic silhouettes isolated in the arid landscapes of the great desert plains or photographed in close-up, they have this strange, absent presence of the living, magnified into beings of legend…
An even more striking timelessness is evident in the landscapes devoid of any human presence and the unusual still lifes, bordering on abstraction, created over the last three decades: skies blackened by birds, fields of withered sunflowers, tree stumps, brambles invading the sands, rocks bound together or in tatters… So many ghosts or memento mori : death lurks in the arid and highly symbolic lands of Graciela Iturbide.
“Graciela Iturbide – Heliotropo 37” – Fondation Cartier
261, boulevard Raspail, Paris 14e
Up to'as of May 29, 2022
gracielaiturbide.org
Stéphanie Dulout