Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) is a photographer from Mexico City. She studied film in 1969, then began photographing seriously after working as an assistant to Manuel Álvarez Bravo. A 1978 assignment among the Seri (Comcáac) and almost a decade of visits to Juchitán, beginning in 1979, led to Juchitán de las Mujeres. Across her photobook sequences, she brings together rituals, work, birds, and people, combining ethnographic observation with images that carry symbolic associations.
Postrevolutionary national imagery and exoticizing views from abroad often turned Indigenous people into models of a “mysterious Mexico.” Iturbide photographed the Seri on an INI assignment, then returned repeatedly to people she met in Juchitán, recording markets, domestic life, celebrations, and political activity. She placed the famous portrait of a woman carrying iguanas on her head, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, within the wider range of everyday scenes assembled in Juchitán de las Mujeres. A boombox appears in the Seri photograph Mujer Ángel, while work, festivities, and muxe people coexist in the Juchitán book. Critics including Leigh Binford have questioned the circulation of one goddess-like portrait as an image standing for an idealized “paradise of women.”
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Contents · Table of Contents
UNAM and Álvarez Bravo — From Filmmaking to Photography
In 1969, Iturbide entered UNAM’s film school with the aim of becoming a director. Drawn to the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, she accompanied him on journeys as his assistant in 1970–71. Photography, encountered during her film studies, became central to her work through those travels. *2 Learning from Álvarez Bravo’s poetic way of seeing, she soon developed photo essays that connected observations made while traveling across several images. *4 The death of her six-year-old daughter Claudia in 1970 also resonates with her later recurring subjects, including birds, slaughterhouses, and self-portraits concerned with death. *7 Yet personal grief alone cannot account for the work. She was also traveling around Mexico and photographing rituals, labor, towns, and Indigenous communities as lived social environments. Travel and repeated visits to the same places became lasting features of her method. *22 Even after moving from film to still photography, accumulated time from travel and return visits informed her photobook sequences. *2 What she learned from Álvarez Bravo was less a search for a “strange Mexico” than the patience to wait until forms and events converged unexpectedly in everyday life. The birds and cemeteries she photographed after Claudia’s death also connect with her coverage of slaughterhouses and rituals, bringing personal history into contact with regional customs.
Photography After the Mexican Revolution — At a Distance from National Images of Indigenous Life
Álvarez Bravo, under whom Iturbide studied, photographed Indigenous cultures alongside urban modernity in the artistic environment of postrevolutionary Mexico. Connected with the construction of a national culture and with modernism, twentieth-century Mexican photography also participated in making images through which the nation recognized itself. *15 Iturbide inherited this tradition while shifting her attention from a supposedly representative Indigenous figure toward sustained encounters with particular people and their daily lives. She resisted the overseas designation of a “surrealist Mexico,” even as her photographs captured moments when personal memory and cultural symbolism converged with an event before the camera. *12 Ordinary streets and markets intersect with ritual scenes within the same body of work. *23 In postrevolutionary cultural policy, rural life, Indigenous people, and folk crafts became key visual elements of national identity. Working within that visual inheritance, Iturbide was wary of reducing her subjects to types of “Mexicanness.” *15 She also distanced herself from labels such as “surrealism” and “magical realism,” which risk fixing Mexico in foreign viewers’ minds as an irrational or exotic place. Her reception developed between these different expectations of national representation at home and exoticism abroad. The relation to Álvarez Bravo extends beyond their shared way of photographing to their reception outside Mexico: his subjects included Indigenous life, religion, and streets, and foreign accounts frequently connected his images with surrealism. Iturbide followed this legacy while strongly resisting the category of magical realism. *14 The boombox in Mujer Ángel and Juchitán’s marketplaces make the contemporary life of the places photographed unmistakable—something those categories alone cannot describe.
Los que viven en la arena — The Contemporary Comcáac Within an Ethnographic Commission
In 1978, Iturbide received a commission from the ethnographic archive of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI). She chose to photograph the Seri (Comcáac) in the Sonoran Desert. The resulting photographs from 1979 are both ethnographic records and the artist’s work; in 2023, they were exhibited again as visual material through which the community could revisit its own history. *5 Living among its members for approximately two months with anthropologist Luis Barjau, Iturbide gradually established a relationship in which she became known as “the person with the camera.” *4 In Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, a woman walks across a hill carrying a boombox. The desert and a manufactured object acquired through trade with the United States share the frame. *8 Imported goods were already integrated into everyday life in a landscape frequently described as traditional. Los que viven en la arena bears the marks of a gradual approach to a community with its own customs and worldview. *6 INPI later shared the photographs anew with the Comcáac as part of their historical memory, raising the question of whose history an ethnographic image is kept to serve. The woman crossing the desert with a boombox embodies the place of mobility and external trade in community life. *8 Ethnographic imagery that privileges cultural “purity” can easily exclude such contemporary objects. Within the terms of a commissioned project, Iturbide recorded older practices and newer things existing at once, challenging a view of Indigenous societies as belonging solely to the past. The institutional origin of the project matters critically as well. When a state agency records Indigenous life, the camera participates in an administrative gaze concerned with who has the authority to define Indigeneity. *5 Iturbide nevertheless retained elements that resist easy classification—the boombox, traded goods, and everyday humor. The Sonoran desert and a modern portable stereo coexist in Mujer Ángel, preserving the community’s life amid commerce and movement.
Juchitán de las Mujeres — Long-Term Relationships and Shared Staging
At the invitation of painter Francisco Toledo, Iturbide visited Juchitán, Oaxaca, in 1979 and began photographing there over approximately ten years. Sustained exchanges with Zapotec communities, where women hold substantial roles in markets and social life, underpinned Juchitán de las Mujeres. *1 Photographs made between 1979 and 1988 became the book of the same title in 1989. *24 The well-known Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas emerged when Zobeida Díaz appeared carrying iguanas on her head on the way to market. *9 Surviving contact sheets retain the time during which Díaz laughed, shifted her position, and responded to the photographer. *2 The selected photograph has a solemnity reminiscent of religious imagery, but its making involved chance and staging shared between sitter and photographer. Repeated visits to the market and time spent eating together fostered the interaction visible in these variations of expression and pose. The finished image’s gravity was not produced through unilateral direction. *2 Yet the exchange during exposure and the later decision about what to publish in the 1989 book are separate processes. Díaz participated in the photographing, while Iturbide selected the image that entered publication and international exhibitions.
The Photobook Juchitán de las Mujeres — The Goddess-Like Portrait and Community Life
Alongside the celebrated Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán de las Mujeres includes a broad range of scenes. Parent-and-child portraits such as Madonna interweave with marketplaces, festivals, political activities, domestic life, and portraits of muxe people. The work Madonna, held by the Brooklyn Museum, offers a quieter register of daily maternal life within the book’s images of women. *10 International circulation through Smithsonian-associated publications and subsequent exhibitions also shaped the wider reception of the series. A prominent criticism is that symbolic photographs can simplify a complex place into images of a “matriarchy” or a “paradise of women.” In “Normalizing Juchitán” (1996), Leigh Binford critically examined the series’ international circulation and the simplification of community life in its representation. *18 More recent studies describe Juchitán as matrifocal rather than strictly matriarchal, distinguishing the mythology made around these photographs from the region’s actual gender arrangements. *19 The sequence of markets, domestic work, celebrations, political action, muxe people, animals, and religious imagery conveys several spheres of life within Juchitán. *18 Yet Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas came to dominate international reception, encouraging the entire town to be remembered as an idealized woman-centered society. The more widely this single portrait circulates, the more important it becomes to return to the photobook’s sequence of workers, homes, festivals, and other scenes. Some people recur in different settings, while labor, domestic life, politics, and celebration inform one another. *18 The book’s edit records decisions about which combinations of scenes would constitute an image of the community. Another position complicates this criticism. Anthropologist Stanley Brandes recognizes the artistic qualities of Iturbide’s photographs of Seri, Zapotec, and Mixtec people and also values them as educational and anthropological material for studying Mexico. *25 Binford’s concern is the international idealization of Juchitán as a “paradise of women”; Brandes emphasizes what the images can contribute to ethnographic knowledge about lives in places such as the Seri communities and Juchitán. Their different readings concern distinct aspects of the photographs’ circulation and use.
Magnolia — Portraits of Muxe People and the Responsibility of Representation
In Magnolia I and Magnolia II (1986), Iturbide photographed a muxe person named Magnolia. A study in ARS analyzes how the two portraits document their subject while also constructing an image of muxe identity through pose, clothing, and choices made by the photographer. *20 Research from UC likewise asks whose viewpoint gains representative authority when photographs of gender-nonconforming people are produced and circulated. *19 Even sustained contact and personal familiarity cannot resolve the editorial question of which portrait is selected and disseminated through a book as representative of an entire community. A critical rereading from the University of Glasgow understands the photographs as visual testimony whose meaning arises among photographer, sitter, and viewer, rather than as a one-way statement. *17 Describing muxe people simply as a “third gender” overlooks local differences of class, family, labor, religion, and self-understanding. Later studies examine Magnolia as a jointly staged portrait to avoid such simplification. *20 Iturbide’s work made an important form of visibility possible at the time, but international viewers could still treat an individual portrait as a complete representation of the community. Magnolia’s clothing and poses belong to a photographic encounter involving the sitter herself; their subsequent circulation as images of all muxe people is a separate matter.
Slaughter Rituals and Cholos/as — Returning Symbolic Images to Social History
The ritual slaughter of goats in La Mixteca brought Iturbide’s recurring interest in death into contact with local economic conditions, including labor exploitation. *3 In the slaughterhouse, daily work, ritual, and the regional economy give a concrete setting to death as a recurring subject. *13 However strong the symbolism of birds or mortality may be, the photographs retain the histories of the places in which they were made. Later works such as La Frontera broadened her attention to border regions, confirming that Indigenous communities within Mexico did not remain her sole subject. A work in SFMOMA’s collection points to her later understanding of the border as a place of movement and cultural exchange as well as a physical line. *16 The 2025 retrospective Serious Play surveyed approximately two hundred works across fifty years, from early ethnographic assignments to architecture, plants, and photographs made abroad. *11 In the goat slaughter, symbolic death meets conditions of labor; in flocks of birds, personal loss intersects with events in the landscape. These histories give the images much of their poetic force. *13 Although Iturbide does not fix their meanings through explanatory captions, the conditions of the places she visited remain legible. Considering those origins lends specificity to the description “poetic documentary.” Cholos/as, photographed in Los Angeles in 1986 and Tijuana in 1989, also demonstrates that her attention extended beyond Indigenous communities. Nadiah Rivera Fellah examines cholo/a clothing, families, gestures, and the staging of portraiture, connecting them to Mexican-origin history and identity across the border. *26 The study also considers women’s roles and matrilineal family ties. Themes of gender and community examined in Juchitán thus reappear differently in the subcultures of the U.S.–Mexico border. The dress, familial relationships, and gestures in the 1980s Cholos/as photographs anticipate questions of movement and cross-border culture addressed in La Frontera.
After the Hasselblad Award — Critical Debates Around “Mexicanness”
Iturbide received the Hasselblad Award in 2008, consolidating international recognition for her work in Latin American photography. *12 Descriptions such as “poetic” or “mysterious” may convey something of the photographs’ appearance, yet they can also reinforce foreign perceptions of Mexico as an unfamiliar land defined by ritual. A review of Graciela Iturbide 55 addresses how international publishing circulates selected photographs as representative images of Mexican photography. *21 The boombox carried by the Seri woman, the Juchitán contact sheets, portraits of muxe people, and the slaughterhouse retain social detail beyond any single symbolic picture. Retrospective material from Secretaría de Cultura describes the artist’s trust in chance and her mixed feelings about the status of individual signature images. She herself resisted fixing their meanings. *7 Read across her different series, published and exhibited at home and abroad, the work extends beyond any one image of an ethnic group. *14 Her career brings together ethnographic commissions, relationships within communities, personal symbolism, and the international circulation of photographs as a subject for criticism. Even recurring images of death and birds are informed by the histories of places she returned to over time. *23 Iturbide’s repeated resistance to labels such as “magical realism” and “surrealism” makes the terms of her critical reception an issue in their own right. Her responsiveness to chance, described in the cultural ministry’s materials, is more precisely understood as a readiness for unpredictable configurations within the real than as a claim about Mexico’s supposed mystery. *7 Her importance lies in producing images that became emblems of Mexico while also making visible, across her career, how such emblems take shape through the state, overseas markets, and the photographer’s decisions. This does not mean that Iturbide always opposed those institutions. She accepted an INI commission and gained recognition through museums and international publications, where some works also became representative images of “Mexican photography.” *21 Success and questions about representation developed within the reception of the same photographs. The photobook’s sequence preserves markets, homes, and political activities that are less visible in the international circulation of Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas alone.
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