EYES AND WINGS: GRACIELA ITURBIDE’S BIRD IMAGES

Abstract

One year before Graciela Iturbide made the photograph En el nombre del padre (1993), she decided to photograph herself with two birds on her eyes, one dead and the other one alive. The birds become her eyes with whom she formulated the question ‘Are these eyes to fly with?’ Going beyond singular interpretations, in this article I analyse Iturbide’s photographs that focus on the theme of birds. Challenging the idea that photography presumes objective legibility, I read Iturbide’s bird images as a subversion to the logic of a textual rationalized language. Therefore, this article argues that Iturbide’s photographs constitute a playful experiment that challenges temporal and spatial boundaries, that go beyond the stillness of time and certainty as it is traditionally conceived in the photographic image. Through and exploration of the intimate relationship between Iturbide’s practice and the notion of photography as a living medium, the article emphasizes the craftsmanship inherent in analogue photography and its significance to produce new ways of seeing. These bird images prompt a reformulation of photography as a fluid practice and Iturbide’s position as a woman within the larger context of Mexican photography.

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Notes

1. Folgarait, Seeing Mexico Photographed, 154.

2. “Graciela Iturbide,” 11–22. In 1976, Pedro Mayer and a group of photographers founded the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía to support and legitimize Latin American photographers. Debates during this time questioned the responsibility and ethics of documentary photography, particularly regarding sensationalized depictions of poverty and neocolonialist instrumentalization. The discussions explored whether social-documentary photography should serve as an ideological denunciation or a more subjective, depoliticized artistic practice (see Dahó, 84). Graciela Iturbide’s photographs defy categorization, offering a poetic vision of contemporary culture infused with life’s surprises and mysteries. Iturbide extensively captured the lives of indigenous communities, such as the Seri Indians, beginning with a 1978 commission from Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute. Her immersive approach aimed to depict the intimacy and subtle aspects of everyday life amidst the Seri’s forced adaptation to modernity since the 1940s. Mujer Ángel is one of the most renowned photographs from this project.

3. “Introduction,” 16.

4. Medina, Graciela Iturbide. Phaidon 55, 14.

5. Dorotinsky, «Graciela Iturbide 55», 187–195.

6. Contrary to the assertions of critics such as Eli Barta, who contends that photographers like Graciela Iturbide and Lola Álvarez Bravo gain recognition primarily for capturing images of ‘poor people’ and embracing exoticism (221), I argue that Iturbide’s photographs occupy a more nuanced position that evades exoticism. While it is true that ethnographic photography often portrays Latin American women through a picturesque lens, Iturbide’s approach to photography diverges from this mode of representation in several key ways: by employing black and white imagery, utilizing photography as a relational force, and occasionally re-naming her photographs with titles that emerge from the image itself, rather than using the subjects’ names. This serves to situate her subjects within a broader narrative context. Iturbide’s intent is not to disregard the person’s individuality, but rather to eschew the paternalistic act of assigning specific names or recalling them, unless the individual in question wishes to be identified.

7. In Iturbide’s Juchitán series, the notion of photography as an encounter is made evident, particularly through the exploration of gender roles within the Zapotec community and the intimacy that she builds with women. This article, however, will focus on the theme of birds as way to rethink photography as an instrument of embodiment.

8. Iturbide often talks about her daughter’s death and the moment in which she began photographing birds. She tells this story when describing her photograph titled ‘Dolores Hidalgo’ from 1978. Here she says: ‘I saw a man who was with his whole family walking to bury a child. I asked him if I could follow him and take some photographs. I always asked. He said yes, but some steps along the path, we saw an adult body, out of a grave, decomposing. We were all so shocked. I remember details like the tennis shoes this dead man was wearing, his upper half was gone however — vultures perhaps. We didn’t know how the body came to be left there, lying in the open. I took it as a symbol, as if Death had visited me to tell me to stop, to stop with this strange therapy, this constant ritual of visiting cemeteries, that it is too painful.’ After the family buried the child a flock of birds took flight in the sky. From then on she began photographing birds instead of cementeries ‘because they represented liberty. Taking those photographs set me free from my suffering’. Iturbide quoted in Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/47fb2801-dcb7-4c49-b1b7-3299c6169cbb.

9. Enriquez, “Bird,” https://analytic-room.com/art/enrique-enriquez/.

10. Ibid.

11. Malabou, El placer borrado, 122. All translations for this book are mine.

12. Malabou, El placer borrado, 123.

13. Ibid., 119.

14. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 129.

15. Here I refer specifically to the works by other women photographers from Mexico like Lola Álvarez Bravo, Mariana Yampolsky, Lourdes Grobet and others that were part of the exhibition ‘Compañeras de Mexico: Women photograph women’ curated by Amy Conger at UC, Riverside in 1990.

16. Dahó, Revolution and Ritual, 16.

17. Malabou, El placer borrado, 119.

18. Artforum, “Graciela Iturbide on Her Life in Photography,” https://www.artforum.com/interviews/graciela-iturbide-on-her-life-in-photography-87806.

19. Here I explicitly mean documentation in relation to the positivist and evolutionist ideologies that tied the photographic medium to the practice of anthropology and ethnography during the XIX century. Specially, those practices that tend to capture a representation of the ‘cultural others’.

20. Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, 69.

21. Ibid.

22. Medina, Graciela Iturbide, 15.

23. Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History, xvi.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isabella Vergara Calderon

Isabella Vergara Calderon is a scholar, writer, and teacher. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation tentatively titled Immaterial Traces: Photographs, Objects, Dust (1980–2010) explores fragility, ephemerality, and precariousness as forms of disruption and resistance in 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Latinx cultures. Her scholarship focuses on intermedial works that highlight their imperfection, impermanence, and open reformulation of aesthetic conventions. Specifically, how their liminal assign significance to texts, images, and sounds and how they inform our world and experience. Vergara has a bachelor’s in literature from Universidad de los Andes (2015) and a master’s in Hispanic Studies from the University of California, Irvine (2018).