Graciela Iturbide Bio

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Graciela Iturbide “Graciela Iturbide is a small woman with a dreamy disposition and soft, searching eyes that seem to reflect the photographer’s natural desire to see and record things unknown”. Being born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide didn’t establish her photography career after her marriage to her professor and mentor, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and becoming a mother of three. Though Graciela began taking pictures at a young age, she had no inspiration until she came across her fascination with Mexican culture, which started her career (Elgraby). Seven years after her marriage in 1962, Graciela enrolled herself at Mexico City’s “Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos” switching from filmmaking to photography, Bravo as her professor. A year later in 1970, Bravo invited his student/wife to be his creative assistant. “Traveling with Bravo, photographing Mexico’s indigenous people gave Iturbide a new insight into her own culture and its people. Influenced by both Bravo and the Surrealism of filmmaker Bunuel, Iturbide combined Bravo’s understanding of his roots with Bunuel’s fascination with religion and mysticism. She further displayed an ability to see the diabolic beauty in violence” (Zellen). Inturbide photography career came about in 1979 after traveling to Junchitan, “a community known for its rare matriarchal social structure,” in Oaxaca to do a photo essay on the woman who lived there. Her photo essay on the woman became one of her well-known projects. Her main subject was on “Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), in which as iguana wraps itself around the head of a woman whose stoic stance reveals the strength and pride of Zapotec woman who take on the role of goddess and healer” (Eldel). Ever since this project, she was privileged to discover her own country, and to travel all over the world while photographing and documenting

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