You have until January 12, 2026 to see (or see again…) the first-ever retrospective of Graciela Iturbide’s work at The International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, affirming her status as one of the most significant and influential photographers of the 20th- and 21st-centuries. This landmark exhibition, organized in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and curated by Carlos Gollonet, Chief Curator of Photography at Fundación MAPFRE, features nearly 200 photographs spanning five decades of her groundbreaking career.
“Graciela Iturbide has constructed a unique world of images that, based on both documentary narrative and poetic imagination, integrates lived experience and dreams into a surprising web of historical, social and cultural references,” said Gollonet. “Beginning with participatory observation and then evolving into a continuous exploration of life, Iturbide’s photography is fundamentally a pretext for learning about the world.”
Born in 1942 in Mexico City, in 1969, at the age of 27, Iturbide enrolled at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónama de México to become a film director. Soon after enrolling she was drawn to photography then being taught by the Mexican modernist Manuel Álvarez Bravo. From 1970–71 she worked as Bravo’s assistant, accompanying him on various photographic journeys throughout Mexico. Iturbide has since traveled extensively as well—within and beyond Mexico—using her camera as a tool to better understand the native cultures of Mexico, the quality and character of modernity and the intimacies of her own life.
Though Mexico and its people—from remote villagers and farmers to artists and urban residents—have often been her primary focus, Iturbide’s photography just as often focuses on the expressive potential of the medium itself. With a personal style that blends the documentary with the poetic to create a kind of magical realism entirely her own, Iturbide’s photographs have long been defined by their inventive yet subtle compositions and dramatic, intimate lighting. Whether of the landscape, the built environment or the people who have made it, her photographs affirm the potential of photography to make contemporary what is ancestral and to transform the familiar into something fundamentally new.
After working with Bravo, Iturbide began exploring Latin America, including a trip to Cuba and several to Panama. In 1978 the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico commissioned her to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population. This commission resulted in one of Iturbide’s earliest projects documenting the Seri Indians, a group of fisherman living a nomadic lifestyle in the Sonoran desert in the northwest of Mexico, along the border with Arizona. Iturbide documented the fragility of their ancestral traditions as they struggled to preserve their way of life for future generations.
Iturbide’s attention to the particularities of communal life—while also exploring its mythic undercurrents—would be both replicated and expanded in her next series on the Juchitán people, who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. For nearly a decade, from 1979 to 1988, Iturbide documented the local customs and traditions of a community where women occupied central roles, portraying them without prejudice or stereotype and instead locating the importance of ritual in everyday life.
Throughout her career, Iturbide has focused on the interaction between nature and culture, describing the many ways that the landscape can take on symbolic meaning. More than a setting or backdrop, the landscape is understood as the ground upon which meaning is created and out of which history is formed, a fact she discovered traveling through Mexico and the United States, from Spain to Italy and India to Bangladesh. Intimate expressions of this conviction can be seen in a myriad of series, from her botanical photographs to her documentation of local festivals and religious ceremonies, each seeking to connect with the past by animating the present. Iturbide has channeled this fascination with time and the landscape into her series of self-portraits, the most recent photographs included in the exhibition.
The expansive scope of Serious Play is informed by Fundación MAPFRE’s long history of both collecting and championing Iturbide’s work—among the earliest acquisitions by the MAPFRE collection when it formed in 2008 and still the biggest
collection of her work outside Mexico—a project that aligns with ICP’s own mission of supporting socially concerned photography. By bringing together photographs from the entirety of her career, the exhibition provides ample opportunity not only to assess the full extent of Iturbide’s achievement, but to also discover how her work will continue to shape the future of photography.
Bob Jeffrey, Chief Executive Office at ICP said, “Graciela Iturbide is without doubt one of the very best photographers, and an inspiration to younger image makers in Mexico and around the world. Iturbide’s retrospective at ICP is a wonderful opportunity to appreciate the full depth and breadth of her achievement.”
Following Serious Play, Fundación MAPFRE’s collection of Graciela Iturbide works will travel to the Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art for an exhibition opening in February 2026.
About Graciela Iturbide
Graciela Iturbide is known for her black-and-white images of the local communities in her native Mexico. In 1979, she published Juchitán de las Mujeres, a book of photographs that inspired her lifelong support of feminist causes. Iturbide has photographed in the Sonoran Desert and Juchitán de Zaragoza (Mexico), as well as in Cuba, Panama, India, Argentina, and the United States. Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Mexico, she studied film at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1969, where she was influenced by the acclaimed Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. She has received several awards, including the Hasselblad and the William Klein Award. This year, she received the Premio Princesa de Asturias 2025.
Zach Ritter
Graciela Iturbide : Serious Play
Until January 12, 2026
International Center of Photography Museum (ICP)
84 Ludlow St.
New York, NY 10002
www.icp.org
Exhibition organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the International Center of Photography.
www.fundacionmapfre.org
