GRACIELA ITURBIDE RETURNS TO HER ROOTS

Five decades into her career, Graciela Iturbide is now revisiting the origins of her practice: the historic center of Mexico City, el Centro. Born in the capital in 1942, Iturbide’s is one of the most recognized names in Mexican photography. She is famous for her surrealist portraits and her dreamlike images of daily life around Mexico, and in its indigenous communities. Her work is part of many important collections around the world, including Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, and Centre Pompidou; and in 2025 she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. Like many young photographers, she began her artistic journey visiting the traditional photography shops and labs of the Centro and capturing scenes of the unique bustle that defines the neighborhood to this day. Iturbide still photographs what she comes across. “Everything in my photography is the surprise of what I encounter,” she says. And the technical side of her work has also remained the same since the beginning of her career. “I am stubborn with analogue photography; printing and revealing is a ritual for me.” Going through the contact sheets she’s accumulated over the years, she always discovers new images. For her, preparing an exhibition consists mostly of editing these previously unseen perspectives of some of her most famous images. “I am pressed to review my archive of negatives and take new photographs to create a new body of work,” says Iturbide of the Centro and Chalma, a major pilgrimage site near Mexico City. She’s visited annually for the last 20 years, capturing the little shifts that she notices over time in the “fiestas, the costumes, and people’s imagination.” Currently, however, Iturbide is interested in more abstract subjects: the soil, the rocks, the mountains, the volcanoes, and the landscape. This fascination with the mineral realm is possibly another expression of her habit of revisiting certain places and subjects again and again — this time, it’s a return to the origins of life itself.