Graciela Iturbide, the Hasselblad Award-winning Mexican photographer, is renowned for her exceptional career in documentary and artistic photography. With a poetic and profound approach, she skilfully captures the essence of Mexico’s life and culture.
Through Alfonso Morales’ compelling narrative, we delve into Graciela Iturbide’s fascination with capturing the lives of the Latino street gang “White Fence” in Los Angeles’ Eastside. It explores the complexities of this community and offers a powerful reflection on identity and migration.
White Fence offers an unparalleled visual journey through Graciela Iturbide’s travels, showcasing unseen images carefully recovered from her archive, accompanied by iconography and documents that help us better understand its history and broaden our knowledge.
On May 2, 1986, images were taken that inspired the book *A Day in the Life of America.* Graciela Iturbide was part of the team of photographers who, over the course of twenty-four hours, documented everyday life in different locations across the United states. Her contribution to the time capsule was a portrait taken in an apartment in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, California. There, she was welcomed by a group of Mexican Americans, mostly deaf women with ties to the White Fence gang.
That initial encounter set the stage for a long-standing friendship and for the creation of a photographic story that could very well be described as the ongoing chronicle of a day that spanned 33 years, from 1986 to 2019.
The current edition, consisting of two volumes, presents a selection of the portraits Iturbide took of her Angelino hosts, along with their surroundings, movements, and connections. It includes an essay by Alfonso Morales Carrillo that details both the development of this photographic series and the historical context it ultimately portrays: the formation and endurance of communities of Mexican descent north of the Rio Grande.
