Graciela Iturbide - International Photographer

Graciela Iturbide, a noted international photographer, was born in 1942 in Mexico City, Mexico. She was the oldest of her 12 siblings. She married at the mere age of twenty to Manuel Rocha Díaz. Iturbide started her career as a photographer in 1970 after her six year old daughter died. She began to study the art of photography at both the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Since her days as a novice photography, Iturbide has become knows for her influential, yet simplistic black and white photographs of everyday life in Mexico and its indigenous culture and tradition. Her very first collection, "Mujer Angel," which was shot in the Sonoran Desert, is what sparked her political interests and shaped her to become a adamant supporter of feminism.

Iturbide has received many awards and is recognized for for the authenticity of her many photos. Along with using authentic Mexicans as her muse, Iturbide also photographed Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles in 1987 as a part of her, "A Day in the Life of America," documentary book. Not only has she photographed in both the United States and Mexico, but in India and Argentina as well. Her photographs have been on display in various prominent museums such as; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles

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County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Museum of Latin American Art. Iturbide has received numerous awards such as the W. Eugene Smith prize for photography in 1987, a first prize award from France's Mois de la Photo,a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988 and received the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award in 2008. Graciela Iturbide is an amazing photographer who has achieved an incredible amount of success through her art.

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Influences of Graciela Iturbide

It is quite obvious that Iturbide is incredibly influenced by her surrounding, teacher, and other artists. One of her main influences when she was just beginning her career as a young photographer was her teacher, cinematographer and photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. He taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, which is where Iturbide started her artistic journey. She looked towards other artists such as Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado and Álvarez Bravo for inspiration as well. The death of her young daughter is what really lead her to photography. I think taking photos really helped her cope with the monumental loss and gave her a way to express her feelings of distress and anguish.

In continuation, another component of her inspiration was her experiences Growing up