Graciela Iturbide

In 2022, the Fondation Cartier presented Heliotropo 37, the first major exhibition in France devoted to the entire catalogue of her works. It brought together a large number of photographs of the people she has met or objects that surprised or inspired her during the course of her various travels across Mexico, as well as Germany, Spain, Ecuador, Japan, the United States, India, Madagascar, Argentina, Peru and Panama between the 1970s and 1990s. Her son, architect Mauricio Rocha, created the scenography of this major exhibition-portrait. Especially for the exhibition, she travelled to Tecali, a village close to Puebla, Mexico, where alabaster is mined and cut, to create a new series in colour – a rare occurrence in her career.

She began her career in photography in the 1970s alongside Manuel Àlvarez Bravo, whom she followed on his travels to Mexican villages and popular festivals. For more than 50 years she has been creating images that oscillate between a documentary approach and a poetic gaze: “I have sought out the surprising in the ordinary, an ordinary that I could have found anywhere else in the world.” While today she is famous for her portraits of the Seri Indians of the Sonoran Desert and her photographic essays on the communities and ancestral traditions of Mexico, Graciela Iturbide also brings a quasi-spiritual attention to landscapes and objects.