Graciela Iturbide: Las Californias

Graciela Iturbide is celebrated for her poetic black-and-white photographs, which blend documentary storytelling with deep explorations of identity and culture. For over fifty years, Iturbide has captured, among others, the lives of Indigenous Mexican communities, rituals in India, and landscapes across the United States. Iturbide describes her work as “photo essays, ”drawing inspiration from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, with whom she worked in the early 1970s; her elegant compositions document the world around her while embracing spontaneity and beauty. Las Californias showcases Iturbideʼs work from East Los Angeles, California, to Tijuana, Baja California, illustrating the complexities of life in the borderlands. Captured in the East LosAngeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights in 1986, Iturbide photographed a group of predominantly deaf Mexican American women connected to the White Fence gang. Iturbide first met the White Fence gang while on a tour of the United States alongside fellow photographers for the book A Day in the Life of America. This initial meeting developed into a thirty-three-year friendship and an extensive photographic story spanning 1986 to 2019.