The First U.S. Retrospective of Work by Photographer Graciela Iturbide at The Parrish Art Museum

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. – “: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide,” a retrospective of one of the most important and celebrated artists working in Latin America today, will be on view at The Parrish Art Museum, 25 Job’s Lane, from November 19 through January 7.

Organized by the Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “” is the first North American tour of Iturbide’s work. Comprising more than 100 gelatin silver prints, the exhibition spans the artist’s career and reveals the deeply personal poetic vision which she brings to the Mexican artistic tradition of exploring issues of identity, diversity and selfhood.

Iturbide, who was born in Mexico City in 1942, was influenced by two of the best-known earlier photographers of Mexico: Tina Modotti, recognized as one of the first socially concerned photographers, and Modotti’s friend Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who began to photograph in Mexico City after Modotti was forced into exile in 1930. Iturbide, who initially studied filmmaking, worked as Alvarez Bravo’s assistant in the early 1970s and began to devote her time and talent to still photography. She traveled to Europe and met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who became another influence on her work, and then returned in 1978 to become a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography.

Like Modotti before her, Iturbide became particularly interested in documenting indigenous groups and in the turbulent events – political reforms, violent demonstrations, and students and intellectual uprisings – that surrounded her. Her first epic project was a study of the Seri Indians of Northern Mexico, which was published in 1981. Since the late 1970s, Iturbide has been documenting the Zapotec Indian people of Juchitan in their daily and ceremonial activities, a body of work which garnered first prize at France’s prestigious “Mois de la Photo” in 1988.

“: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” is accompanied by a publication, produced by Aperature in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which contains 81 duotone reproductions of Iturbide’s work, a preface by the poet and critic Roberto Tejada, and an epilogue by the anthropologist Alfredo Lopez Austin, professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

For information, call 43½83-2118.