photo: © Graciela Iturbide – Mexico City, 1969. Outstanding Contribution to Photography, Sony World Photography Awards 2021
The World Photography Organisation (WPO) named photographer Graciela Iturbide the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography 2021 award. Iturbide is widely recognized as Latin America’s greatest living photographer. Her work provides a photographic account of Mexico since the late 1970s and has made an important contribution to the country’s visual identity.
Twenty-five images from Iturbide’s body of work were presented in a virtual exhibition available on the World Photography Organisation website beginning April 15, 2021.
Selected by the artist, the exhibition highlights key milestones and themes from her five-decade career, including some of her most iconic images, such as Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas) and Mujer ángel (Angel Woman).
In images of everyday life and culture alongside those of ritual and religion, Iturbide explores her country’s many complexities and contradictions, addresses its inequalities, and highlights the tensions between city and countryside, the modern and the Indigenous.
Her photographs go beyond conventional documentary narratives and seek to offer a poetic vision of their subjects, grounded in the photographer’s personal experiences and travels.
Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942 into a traditional Catholic family, the eldest of thirteen siblings. Growing up, she admired her father’s amateur photography and treasured the box containing her family’s photographs. She married at age 20 and had three children in quick succession.
It was not until 1969, at age 27, that she decided to pursue her artistic passions and enroll at the film center of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. While studying there with modernist master and later mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo, she decided to focus on photography. During this period, photography also became a form of therapy for Iturbide after the tragic loss of her six-year-old daughter Claudia in 1970.
By the late 1970s, Iturbide had become a central figure in a growing movement of Latin American photographers who united to reclaim their countries’ visual identities from the viewpoints of foreign photographers.
In 1978, as part of a broader initiative to help restore Indigenous cultures, the Ethnographic Archive of Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute commissioned Iturbide to photograph the country’s Indigenous population.
Iturbide worked with anthropologist Luis Barjau and immersed herself in the Seri community, learning its customs and documenting its way of life, with particular attention to its forced adaptation to capitalism.
The results of Barjau and Iturbide’s collaboration were published in the 1981 book Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand). At the time of publication, it was one of only a few Mexican studies among hundreds of American texts and was immediately recognized for its more authentic contribution.
Living with the Seri marked the beginning of a major part of Iturbide’s career and confirmed her deep commitment to exploring her country and her desire to build relationships with its diverse communities and photograph them.
Today, her work with the Seri and later with the Zapotec community in Juchitán is regarded as some of Iturbide’s finest photography. Her images do not seek to exoticize their subjects; instead, they offer the perspective of someone seeking to understand and acknowledge her own culture.
In addition to photographs of Indigenous communities in Mexico, the selection includes images from Iturbide’s travels to Italy, the United States, and India, focusing on the natural world and underscoring her fascination with its inherent symbolism and spirituality.
Graciela Iturbide said of her work and receiving the award: "I am delighted and honored to receive this award. This kind of recognition is a great incentive to continue. Everything I have photographed throughout my life has filled my spirit and driven me to repeat the process again and again. For me, photography creates a sense of understanding of what I see, what I live for, and what I feel, and it is a good pretext for getting to know the world and its culture."
Previous recipients of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award include Mary Ellen Mark, William Klein, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt and, most recently, Martin Parr, Candida Höfer, Nadav Kander and Gerhard Steidl.
More information: www.worldphoto.org.
