Internationally acclaimed Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has spent more than five decades creating images that explore the relationships between identity, culture, place, and everyday life. Working primarily in black and white, Iturbide approaches photography through observation and personal connection, developing relationships with her subjects that allow moments of intimacy, spontaneity, and self-expression to emerge.
Las Californias brings together photographs spanning East Los Angeles, California, to Tijuana, Baja California. A significant portion of the exhibition comes from Iturbide’s White Fence series, which began in Boyle Heights in 1986 when she photographed a group of predominantly deaf Mexican American women connected to the White Fence gang. The encounter developed into a decades-long relationship, resulting in photographs of Rosario, Lisa, Cristina, Boo Boo, and others that capture friendship, family, gesture, cultural identity, and daily life. The exhibition includes numerous works from this series alongside photographs made in Tijuana and Baja California, where Iturbide turned her attention toward the border and the experiences of those living within its physical and cultural landscape.
These histories also extend into the San Joaquin Valley through Iturbide’s 1991 portrait of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in Kern County. Together, the photographs resist a singular understanding of Mexican and Chicano identity or of the border itself. Instead, Las Californias reveals interconnected cultural landscapes shaped by migration, labor, friendship, resistance, aspiration, and memory, offering a meditation on the complicated and enduring meanings of belonging and home.
