Graciela Iturbide

• Xavier Barral 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A major figure of Latin-American photography, Graciela Iturbide’s approach combines the documentary and the lyrical. Off-center compositions, graphic effects, and heavy shadows create a poetic universe where a feeling of strangeness is combined with one of harsh reality. The powerful equilibrium of her compositions produces skies filled with birds, comical, unexpected situations where chickens are pictured sitting wisely on market stalls, while elsewhere chirping flocks appear to invade the scene in agile, flowing movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away in her work, nor indeed is a certain sense of the surreal. 

An organic dimension, linked to blood, flesh, mud, sweat, and the earth also permeates most of Graciela Iturbide’s images, for she has a special relationship with reality, choosing to capture unique moments with her lens. Birds and men cohabit and rub up against each other. From India to Mexico, gulls, eagles, pigeons, herons, and ravens invade man’s space or insinuate their way into it in a serendipitous, solitary fashion.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. For this title, Lesaffre focuses on the different environments birds live in and their unbelievable capacity to adapt themselves whether it is in the sky, water or at the highest summits. 

English edition.

• Editorial RM 2024
• Boxed set of hardback/softcover, 1st edition
• New

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, offering 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 will help to better understand its history and broaden our knowledge.

On May 2, 1986, images were captured that gave rise to the book A Day in the Life of America. Graciela Iturbide formed part of the team of photographers who, over the course of twenty-four hours, registered 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 who were mostly deaf women with ties to the White Fence gang.

That initial encounter set the stage for a long-standing friendship as well as the composition of a photographic tale that could very well be described as the intermittent chronicle of a day prolonged for thirty-three years, from 1986 to 2019.

The present edition, comprised of two volumes, offers a selection of the portraits Iturbide took of her Angelino hosts as well as their surroundings, movements, and connections. It features an essay by Alfonso Morales Carrillo describing both the development of this photographic series and the historic background it ultimately conveys: the formation and persistence of communities of Mexican descent north of the Rio Grande.

Boxset with 2 volumes in a hardcover slipcase.