By Giulia Giuliani and Celia Goodman

On Thursday, February 17th, the Fondation Cartier hosted a talk with Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon to accompany the museum’s current exhibition Heliotropo 37, featuring decades’ worth of photographs by Iturbide from her early work in the 70s to her latest colored series created especially for the exhibition.       

Before the talk, attendees were given the opportunity to visit the exhibition, whose namesake is the address of Iturbide’s studio in Mexico City that was constructed by her son, who, alongside the artist herself, functioned as scenographer of the show. There are photographs of the studio taken by the artist Pablo López Luz in the downstairs section of the exhibition, where a video of Iturbide shooting photographs plays, showing the importance of the artist’s space to her creative process.

The space of the exhibition consists of two rooms on the ground floor and a large room in the basement. The upstairs rooms, where the visit begins, contain works from the last twenty years, and by descending to the basement, the visitor travels back in time in the artist’s oeuvre. Iturbide’s more recent works are far more abstract than the portraits she is known for: using lines of telephone wires, hair, sticks, branches, etc., she creates contrasted, black and white, square-format compositions which highlight the geometry of the quotidian. In the second ground-level room are photographs taken at the botanical garden in Oaxaca where a quote by the artist on the wall reads, “I saw these plants as sculptures.” These, too, focus on the forms and textures of the cacti. Along with these are the photographs taken for the exhibition, which represents the artist’s only foray into color photography in her nearly 50-year long career. Using large pieces of alabaster and onyx at Mexican quarries as their subject, these images are far less striking than Iturbide's previous work. Though she is able to capture the pink and white color of the stone, the images lack the contrast and depth of her black and white landscapes through which she is able to distill the geometric nature of her subjects.

Upon entering, the downstairs section appears disjointed from the first: it consists of a retrospective look at Iturbide’s travels from the 1970s onward when she turned her camera mainly towards human subjects rather than landscapes: specifically underrepresented groups such as the Zapotec and Seri indigenous populations of her native Mexico, gang members in California, and transgender women in India. However, her subjects tend not to take on effusive facial expressions, and sometimes their faces are blocked completely with masks. Mainly, they stare directly into the lens of the camera, straight-faced. These subjects even start to feel more like sculptural or compositional elements at times, which shows the artist’s preoccupation with geometry and connects her earlier and later work. However, this hardly means that the portrait-sitters are dehumanized by Iturbide. The photographer poses them within their domestic contexts and asks them to make eye contact with the camera, forcing the viewer to confront the indigenous people and places of Mexico which are too often ignored, both on a national and international scale. In sum, Iturbide’s black and white portraits capture a view of Mexican life that is both grounded in the normalcy of the country’s culture and imaginative in its approach. 

The diversity and richness of Central American culture rarely receives so much attention as it did the night of the talk. Seeing representations of women and children from the indigenous Zapotec and Seri cultures wearing their traje in the market, a funeral, at home, or a community celebration is refreshing: while so many previously otherize their subject or turn Latin Americans into a monolith, Iturbide captures them in a way that allows the personhood/culture to ground the viewer. 

The talk was moderated by the exhibition’s general curator and founder of the publishing house Editions Toluca, Alexis Fabry, and began with a discussion about the workings/processes behind both guests’ work. Iturbide answered the question of “decisive moments” in her work by saying that there are two decisive moments: the first what she sees when she takes a photo, and the second what she discovers later on her worktable. She mentioned that in her discoveries she often finds out that what she thought was beautiful can turn out to be horrible. Iturbide is quoted on the Fondation Cartier’s website: “I have looked for the surprise in the ordinary.” This statement is particularly emblematic of her portraits; they surprise her and viewers in their own discovery of mankind. 

A theme in Iturbide’s work is death, with photographs of funeral processions, tombs, and people wearing skull masks. She stated that for a while she had a preoccupation with death after the passing of her young daughter and that she used her photography as a “therapy” to deal with a great loss. Iturbide recounted a time when she saw a man standing in the middle of the road with a skull mask covering half of his face and felt in that moment that Death was telling her to stop therapy and the continued “suffering for her daughter”. Later, Iturbide accompanied this man to bury his child, where she saw “thousands and thousands of birds” fly overhead, which led her to her new focus: looking for the “freedom of the birds.” 

Iturbide describes her work to have a “touch of poetry and imagination”, a phrase she prefers than to be associated with surrealism or as she stated, “magical realism”. Iturbide told the audience of her distaste with the liberal use of the “surrealist” label, specifically towards Latinx artists by Europeans, which ultimately alienates their work and communicates that their land is fantastical and full of exotic wonders. Iturbide affirms her stance by saying that calling Latinx artists surrealist or grouping them into the same magical basket is “too easy” and takes away from the reality of Latin American countries. Turning to Fabry, she stated: “It is very easy to tell you [artists], ahhh you have to do with magical realism. No! It’s the reality of my country, it’s normal!” 

Heliotropo 37 showcases for the first time in France Iturbide’s life’s work and runs until May 26th. The Foundation Cartier offers discounts to students (must show card), people under 26th, and a “Free Student Tuesday” from 6 pm.     

https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/exhibitions/graciela-iturbide