Tag: Graciela Iturbide

Four years ago, at the age of seventy-three, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide travelled across her country with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Their journey began in the southern state of Tabasco, near the border with Guatemala, where migrants make their way north atop a notorious freight train known as La Bestia. In the town of Tenosique, Iturbide stopped by La 72, a shelter built in memory of seventy-two migrants who were slain by a drug cartel, their bodies found, blindfolded and bound, in a derelict farm across the border from Brownsville. The backdrop for many of her photographs were shelters run by friars and nuns, where she captured migrants in rare moments of respite. We see a pair of lovers, who had met on the road, locked in an embrace, and a mother unwinding with her infant son, their forms casting a shadow on a hand-painted mural of Mexico dotted with safety and danger zones. On the last stop of her trip, at a shelter in Oaxaca, Iturbide met a Salvadoran teen-ager who was fleeing MS-13 because he had refused to kill. She found the boy in front of a desktop computer, listening to MS-13 raps and composing his own verses. “Even if he didn’t want to belong anymore, he still did,” Iturbide told me recently by phone, from her studio, in Mexico City.

In 1969, Graciela Iturbide was enrolled in the prestigious University Center for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with the dream of becoming a film director — until she began studying with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the nation’s foremost photographer.

Which is why 2019 is the appropriate year for the world to discover Graciela Iturbide, who now has extensive exhibitions in Boston and Mexico City. For a half-century, Iturbide has traveled across her own country with a camera loaded with black-and-white film. She has taken pictures that are often described as dreamlike, surreal or painterly, but those words fall short.

Over the past 50 years, Ms. Iturbide has captured layers of Mexico’s diverse cultures and practices, as well as the struggles and contrasts across the nation.