Midterm

                                                

            Graciela Iturbide

The name of the artist who I assigned to is Graciela Iturbide. She is a Mexican artist. She was oldest of thirteen kids. In the video I saw that her artwork was all about photography. Although she was a photographer she did not learn about photography, but about life. She tried to photograph that usually not seen. She worked with black and white photography and it was her way, which expressed herself very well. Her photographs are Catholic related. She was very careful to take photograph and her material was real life. Iturbide works as an anthropologist does, living among a community, befriending its women and children, and sharing in their daily chores and annual festivities. She enters the sacred and intimate world of cemeteries, healings, marketplaces, and homes. She was interested to know the world. She says, “Lies in what her eyes see and what her heart feels—what moves her and touches her.”  She took self portrait too. At the beginning she used to photograph the abstract objects.

 She received special permission to photograph the Kahlo belongings that remain at the Blue House. The images she captured represented the Kahlo's daily life such as leg brace, old dishes and so on. One especially interesting item of Iturbide was Kahlo's hospital gown, covered in a striking combination of paint and blood. She start landscape photograph when she came US. She saw empty streets, no human, which is different from Mexico.  She has produced studies of landscapes and culture in India, Italy, and the Unites States, but her principal concern has been the exploration and investigation of Mexico of her own cultural environment through black-and-white photographs of landscapes and their inhabitants, abstract compositions, and self-portraits.  Her images of Mexico's indigenous people of the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Seri—are poignant studies of lives within the bounds of traditional ways of life, now confronted by the contemporary world. Turning the camera on herself, Iturbide reveals the influence of her mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo in self-portraits that transform her quotidian self and play with formal innovation and attention to detail. She has also documented “cholo” culture in the White Fence barrio of East Los Angeles and migrants at the San Diego/Tijuana border, illuminating the bleak realities of her subjects' search for the American Dream. Her prints are etchings of exquisite tonal beauty, texture, and detail. She is really a talent artist. She collected different parts of life and presented to the world by black and white color. It’s really amazing.