Suspended between the sky and the earth, the right here and the elsewhere, the charred lands and the sidewalks or the clouds shrouded by birds, Graciela Iturbide’s eager and piercing eye has caught the strangeness of the world. This eye, looking out for the incongruous, for the poetry lurking within the bizarre, has made the boundaries of documentary images waver, inflecting it in the direction of the world of chimeras, in the direction of a magical and visionary realism.&
A serious determine in Latin American images, educated within the 1970s by Manuel Àlvarez Bravo, winner of the Hasselblad Prize in 2008, the Mexican photographer is the subject of an enormous retrospective on the Fondation Cartier, bringing together more than 200 pictures, from “iconic” works to the newest pictures, together with a collection in colour (produced especially for the exhibition) that stands out in her black and white work, which is caught up in “shapes, lights and shadows.”&
“I seemed for the surprise in the bizarre, an odd that I might have discovered anyplace else,” explains the lady who gave additional soul to Those that reside within the sand (Los que viven en la area, a collection made in 1978 in the Seri group, among the many Indians of the Sonora desert), but in addition to the Cholos, deaf-mute Chicanos of the western United States (White Fence Gang, 1986-1989), and who immortalized the women of Juchitán, heirs of the Zapotec culture, within the Oxaca valley (Mexico).
The surprise, the weird, will thus be her spur, her compass, throughout all her peregrinations, in Mexico but in addition in Germany, Spain, Ecuador, Japan, america, India, Madagascar, Argentina, Peru, Panama – between the 1970s and the 1990s.&
“Images is a ritual for me. To go away with my digital camera, to watch, to seize probably the most mythical a part of the man, then to penetrate within the darkness, to develop, to choose the symbolic,” declares Graciela Iturbide. One also understands the unusual energy emanating from her pictures, which, by their symbolic scope, their “legendary” aura and their “disquieting strangeness,” far surpass documentary images. Her famous Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, topped with (dwelling) iguanas, has the timeless gaze and the bearing of a queen; as does her younger woman in Zapotec costume, and all of the indigenous men and women she has immortalized: hieratic silhouettes isolated within the arid scenery of the good desert plains or photographed in tight framing, they have this strange absent presence of the dwelling magnified into legendary beings…
A timelessness much more perceptible in the landscapes devoid of any human presence and the weird still lifes, bordering on abstraction, created during the last three many years: skies blackened with birds, fields of pale sunflowers, stumps of timber, brambles invading the sands, roped rocks or in rags… so many ghosts or memento mori: demise is lurking in the arid and eminently symbolic lands of Graciela Iturbide…&
Exhibition Graciela Iturbide – Heliotropo 37
Until Might 29th
Fondation Cartier – Paris – www.fondation.cartier.com
Stéphanie Dulout&
L’article GRACIELA ITURBIDE – MYTHICAL est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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