The photograph of a woman walking, in which only her legs decorated by a line on the skin and the very distinctive floor of a municipality in Oaxaca can be seen, is testimony to the diverse viewpoints that Graciela Iturbide's gaze focuses on. While in her early works in the early 70s she focused on people, over time she began a quest to read the environment from its own everyday ways.
Throughout her career, Iturbide has worked with women from different cultures and in various settings, who she shows in their essence and in total empathy with their identity. Although in this piece there is no face that responds to the characteristics of the portrait genre, it does show the profile of a specific woman who was ing by at the time and place to which the photographer's attention was drawn. It is, if you will, existing and being in a place captured in time.
In this image taken in Etla, Oaxaca, Iturbide strips the person of an individual identity to focus both on a common action and on such specific elements that they can guide or confuse the viewer's interpretations. Without paying attention to a pose or a mise-en-scèn, the record responds to the spontaneity of an act as ordinary as walking, which not only s for the trajectories of the artist herself, a tireless traveler, but also the journeys of the women who inhabit this town.
It is precisely the plasticity of the objects - the textures, the contrasts, the shapes - that interest the photographer to set her gaze on the unexpected. A walk, in this case, which judging by the context and the parts that make up the photograph oscillates between the tradition and modernity that are so much a part of the Mexico that Graciela Iturbide has captured.
AC, February 2021.
References:
http://www.gracielaiturbide.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh6GZJll6b8
https://cultura.nexos.com.mx/?p=14270
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QhISeV9eiI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9B-eC3X5Ao
https://revista192.com/graciela-iturbide-192/
The photograph of a woman walking, in which only her legs decorated by a line on the skin and the very distinctive floor of a municipality in Oaxaca can be seen, is testimony to the diverse viewpoints that Graciela Iturbide's gaze focuses on. While in her early works in the early 70s she focused on people, over time she began a quest to read the environment from its own everyday ways.
