Graciela Iturbide

The birds are birds as we know them and are birds that cannot be known: they are common and uncommon, whirling and blurred: the birds are dead: the birds are gawking and gawky, tender and woebegone; the birds are dirty and transient and religious and encaged within effigies of themselves; the birds are man-made or they swarm or are migratorily indifferent. The birds hover and soar and loan themselves out for metaphorical exploitation. Very soon, they will fly off the page.

Photographs taken by Graciela Iturbide (Mexico City 1942). This is the largest survey yet published on the work of Graciela Iturbide, the most acclaimed photographer working in Latin America and winner of the 2008 Hasselblad Award. It includes 180 representative photographs spanning her career, focusing on her best-known work, such as Frida Kahlo's Bedroom, Those Who Live in the Sand and Juchita n. Over the course of her four-decade career, Iturbide has built up a poetic language of images and symbols; a consistent preoccupation is the juxtaposition between urban and rural life. The subjects of her black-and-white photography mostly reside in Latin America but encompass India, Europe and Asia as well. This volume provides an essential overview of her accomplishment.

"With secrets drawn from her archive, Graciela Iturbide creates a curious world in which the human subjects we encounter in her widely-known portraits are absent. In asor, the human subject is the reader alone, dream borne, on a journey in which all places remain nameless, time cannot be ascertained, and the course is lost to the imagination. Loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Iturbide constructs her intimate and contemporary extension of Lewis Carroll's classic tale without words, making equal use of the narrative and compositional elements of her photographs to startle her readers with visual riddles and quick shifts of perspective. To accompany a reader along this unlikely journey are six electroacoustic works by composer Manuel Rocha Iturbide. These works, composed over a fifteen year period from 1990 to 2005 from sources taped by Rocha Iturbide during his extensive travels, were selected by the composer in response to his mother's photographs." [Publisher's statement].