Graciela Iturbide, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, 1979 , Signed by the artist in ink on recto, Silver Gelatin Print, 20 x 16, 50.8 x 40.6 cm
Countless photographers hope to produce a single indelible image over the course of their careers, something so unforgettable it is seared onto the collective unconscious. Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has made not one but several of these images.
There’s the photograph of a Zapotec woman in a southern Mexican market, her head draped in a crown of iguanas, striking a pose. There is the spectral figure of an indigenous Seri woman, clad in a long dress, who floats through the desert clutching only a boom box. And there is the woman, with the seen-it-all stare, having a drink and a smoke in a Mexico City bar — her mortality, and ours, writ large in a mural of a skull that looms large over her shoulder.
