C/O Berlin dedicates to Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide her first major Berlin retrospective, spanning more than five decades, from Mexico to the United States by way of India.
A man stands at the center of a Mexican square, holding two mirrors against his body. In their reflection, the crowd behind him doubles, fragments and recomposes itself. This image, found at the end of the exhibition, sums up Graciela Iturbide’s approach: photography as a device for reflecting the world, saying as much about the person looking as about what is being looked at.
Born in 1942 in Mexico, Iturbide studied cinema before meeting photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, for whom she was an assistant and through whom she became attuned to the mystical dimension of reality. In 1970, she lost her daughter Claudia, then six years old. From that tragedy onward, death would become one of her recurring subjects, notably through the angelitos: children dressed as angels after their death according to Mexican tradition. The exhibition recounts this anecdote: one day, following a funeral procession, Iturbide came across, in the middle of the road, a body half devoured by vultures; she looked up and photographed the birds. That is how they entered her work and never left it.
One of Iturbide’s landmark works is her series Juchitán de las Mujeres, developed over ten years in a Zapotec community in southern Mexico where women hold the economic reins and where the Muxes – people of a third gender – occupy a fully recognized place. Iturbide avoids all fantasizing: “I do not aspire to mythologize Indigenous populations. What I like is their way of mythologizing daily life.” Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (1979) is its most emblematic image: a Zapotec vendor crowned with live iguanas, gaze turned upward, caught in her own theater.
White Fence, begun in 1986 and continued over three decades, shifts this gaze toward East Los Angeles. Iturbide creates an enduring relationship of trust with her subjects; she makes her way into their world and thereby gains her legitimacy. We find Rosario, Cristina and Liza posing in front of a fence, defying the lens. Further on, the same Rosario applies makeup in front of a small mirror, her baby lying on the bed beneath a crucifix, evoking another aspect of motherhood. And the Cholitos, three children with their heads covered in fabric, one of whom brandishes a toy gun: childhood reenacting what it sees.
In India and Bangladesh, Iturbide finds the same interweavings between everyday gestures and their spiritual dimension. One striking image: a woman in Varanasi, her sari embroidered with flowers, the veil covering her head by her own hands and thereby concealing her face. In Dhaka, she turns her lens toward women whose presence she restores without ever reducing their existence to their condition.
If death runs through all of Iturbide’s work, it is above all approached with life. The orange color of the cempasúchil, the flower of the dead, physically guides the exhibition route. The black and white of La Matanza, documenting the ritual slaughter of goats in the Mixtec region, radiates against this orange. In a more intimate register, the series devoted to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul: invited to photograph the huipiles, the artist’s traditional Mexican tunics, Iturbide notices a bathroom that had been closed for several years after Kahlo’s death in 1954 and asks to return to it. What strikes her most: the large bottles of Demerol, the analgesic Kahlo had taken decades earlier. She recomposes the objects, photographs crutches, corsets and relics… and places her own feet in the bathtub. A suggested portrait of a woman whom she refuses to turn into an icon.
“The photographer’s task is to infuse what we see with what we are, to make poetry out of reality.” This retrospective is the demonstration of that: a body of work anchored in the world, eyes wide open.
Noémie de Bellaigue
Eyes to Fly With is on view at C/O Berlin until June 10, 2026.
C/O Berlin
Hardenbergstraße 22-24,
10623 Berlin
https://co-berlin.org
