Meeting with Graciela Iturbide and Eduardo Halfon

Night of Uncertainty

With: Graciela Iturbide and Eduardo Halfon.
Discussion moderator: Alexis Fabry, general curator of the exhibition Heliotropo 37.
Reading texts: Marcelline Delbecq.

To celebrate the opening of Heliotropo 37, the exhibition-portrait of Graciela Iturbide, the Fondation Cartier invites the Mexican photographer and Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon for a discussion before a live audience.

From February 12 to May 29, the Fondation Cartier is proud to present Heliotropo 37, the first large-scale exhibition in France devoted to Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. For over fifty years, this major artist on the Latin American photography scene has been creating images that poetically explore the rites and ceremonies behind everyday gestures.

“I’ve sought the surprise in the ordinary, an ordinary that I could have found anywhere else in the world.” - Graciela Iturbide.

If Graciela Iturbide is famous today for her portraits of the Seri Indians, descendants of the indigenous populations living in the Sonoran Desert, and her images of women in Juchitán, not far from the Pacific Coast on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, she is also known for her photographic essays on the communities and ancestral traditions of Mexico. Across all of her production, she bears a spiritual attention to landscapes and objects. Over the years, her shots have emptied themselves of human presence and her focus has been on materials and textures. Heliotropo 37, which brings together over 200 photographs from the 1970s to the present day, presents two sides to the work of this immense artist, thereby providing viewers with a new perspective.

As an introduction to this exhibition-portrait, Graciela Iturbide will chat with Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon, author of Mourning and more recently Canción, as well as a new short story, The Lake, specially penned for the exhibition catalog.

Biographies

Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide studied cinema and then took up photography with Manuel Álvarez Bravo in the early 1970s. Following him on his travels through Latin America and inspired by the work of Josef Koudelka and Henri Cartier-Bresson, she forged her own vision and gradually created a unique artistic work. Her photographs have been exhibited extensively in Mexico and in international museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1982, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1990, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Monterrey, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996, and the Tate Modern in London in 2013. She is the laureate of the W. Eugene Smith Prize in 1987, the Higashikawa Prize in 1990, and the Hasselblad Prize in 2008.

Born in Guatemala in 1971, Eduardo Halfon grew up in the United States, returned to his native country after completing his studies, and taught literature for eight years at Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala City. The parallel processes of relearning his mother tongue after spending twelve years in the United States and studying literature and philosophy inspired him to write his first novel, Esto no es una pipa, Saturno, in 2003. In 2010, his short novel La pirueta was awarded the José María de Pereda prize. In 2011, Eduardo Halfon received a Guggenheim Award for The Polish Boxer, currently his most translated book. Published in 2018, his novel Mourning

received wide-spread critical acclaim and was awarded the Premio de las Librerías de Navarra, the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and, in France, the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger. In 2015, his body of work was recognized with the Prix Roger Caillois and, in 2018, he received Guatemala’s National Prize for Literature, his country’s highest literary honor.