Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit
Christo (1990) and the two Magnolias (1986) are part of a rich retrospective of the work of Graciela Iturbide now showing at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. These black-and-white photographs were taken in Mexico, Latin America, and Los Angeles between the 70s and the early 90s. As the show’s curators put it, this Mexican photographer aims “to investigate and articulate the ways in which ‘Mexico’ is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices.” Iturbide does not document the complex rituals of Mexico’s multilayered cultures as an outsider displaying the poor or the exotic, however, but transforms the formalist approach she inherited from social realist Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier-Bresson into a vehicle for the definition of both nation and self.
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Of course our culture is fascinated by angels and other New Age religious manifestations. But “Images of the Spirit” shows that Iturbide is a materialist: she documents mystery and magic as they appear in the world using that most empirical of means, the camera. Furthermore, while pop culture in the United States encourages passive reception of objects and ideas–buying angels in gift shops or reading about them–in Mexico objects are made by hand in rural areas for the rites surrounding such passages as marriage and death. Angelito mexicano (“Mexican Cherub,” 1984) shows a small boy in Chalma, in the state of Mexico, standing against a wall, as do many of Iturbide’s subjects. He’s dressed as an angel for a pageant, wearing wings of cardboard or plywood carefully painted with the quills and barbs of feathers. Still, the painted wings have a curious flatness in contrast to the complex tones in the rest of the photograph: the boy’s satin robe alone contributes a beautiful range of highlights and grays. In his hand he holds a bough, which like his wings and gown has been made by a member of the community. The boy, who’s stepped aside from some spectacle, is somber, almost frowning–how different his grave interpretation of his role is from European cherubs, fertility symbols who also straddle the territory between the sacred and the profane but are always portrayed as smiling and playful. This boy seems not just a child impersonating an angel in a passion play but some grave angel of history.
The fabled distrust of photography in Native American cultures has its parallel in contemporary concerns that anthropological photographs are intrusive and exploitative, commodities in the postmodern image market. The best modernist documentary photographers, however, have consciously negotiated and redefined the web of gazes among subjects, photographer, and audience. When Iturbide travels to a Mexican town, she gets to know the people who live and work there, and her photographs reflect the relationship of trust she establishes. Often aware they’re being photographed, her subjects seem to present themselves as they want to appear, giving Iturbide’s work a theatrical quality resonant with layers of impersonation.
These rural Mexican women are in many ways distant from our culture, but they appeal to us because of the strength, dignity, and grace they derive from their work. Iturbide seems to play with a postmodern subversion of the modernist focus on progress: her general avoidance of the contemporary world seems studied. She offers instead a vision of the vitality of traditional life; in her view this is not a reactionary alternative but the path to a viable future. In Iturbide’s vibrant photographs, appearances are theatrical, festive, subversive, carnival-esque–never oppressive. Her women seem not to have internalized or been consumed by their roles; the misogynist, outwardly imposed masks of history and progress have not damaged their spirits.
