Graciela Iturbide has become one of the foremost fine art photographers living in Mexico today.  Her work is a mixture of history, lyricism and portraiture.  The subtle yet powerful photographs blend the evocative scenes of the cultures of her native Mexico with her own deeply personal vision.  In dreamlike encounters with things that at first may appear ordinary, Graciela Iturbide perceives the surreal and extraordinary.  The photographs combine the story of a culture in transition with issues of identity, diversity, and selfhood.  She has remarkably engaged the workaday life and seasonal celebrations of various communities throughout Mexico for the past 35 years.  One of the major concerns in the work of Graciela Iturbide’s has been to explore and articulate the ways the “voice,” of Mexico is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices.  The evidence she has gathered is a virtual territory unto itself.

Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942.  She began to study film-making in the late 1960s at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos.  While assisting Manuel Alvarez Bravo in the early 1970s, she studied photography, and soon devoted herself to the art.  Traveling to Europe around this time, she met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who became a significant influence on her work.  In 1978 she became a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography.  Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in many major museum collections including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to name only a few.  She continues to live and work in Mexico.