Photographer Graciela Iturbide at Annenberg Space for Photography

Graciela Iturbide: My Experience Photographing Refugees and Displaced People

Thursday, May 26, 2016 / 6:30-8:00PM  

Annenberg Space for Photography  Los Angeles, CA

Free Admission

Graciela Iturbide shares her experience photographing refugees and displaced people in Mexico and Colombia, where she found despair and suffering, but also strength.

Graciela Iturbide nació en 1942 en la Ciudad de México.A principios de los años 70, Iturbide viajó a través de Latinoamérica, en particular a Cuba y Panamá.  

Graciela Iturbide is considered one of the most important and influential Latin American photographers of the past four decades. Her photography is of the highest visual strength and beauty.

Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. For Iturbide, the camera is just a pretext for knowing the world. Her interest, she says, lies in what her eyes see and what her heart feels—what moves her and touches her. Although she has produced studies of landscapes and culture in India, Italy, and the Unites States, her principal concern has been the exploration and investigation of Mexico—her own cultural environment—through black-and-white photographs of landscapes and their inhabitants, abstract compositions, and self-portraits. Her images of Mexico’s indigenous people—the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Seri—are poignant studies of lives within the bounds of traditional ways of life, now confronted by the contemporary world. Turning the camera on herself, Iturbide reveals the influence of her mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo in self-portraits that transform her quotidian self and play with formal innovation and attention to detail. She has also documented cholo culture in the White Fence barrio of East Los Angeles and migrants at the San Diego/Tijuana border, illuminating the bleak realities of her subjects’ search for the American Dream….