The Poetic Decisive Moments of Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexico, 1942), the latest recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, reflects on nearly half a century as a hunter of moments in the exhibition 'When Light Speaks'. Part of the PHotoEspaña program, it gathers 115 images at the Casa de México Foundation in Madrid until September 14, portraying freedom, mystery, and poetry in Iturbide's powerful dialogue with light.

Petite and fragile, Iturbide's figure contrasts with the strength of her photographs, "mostly the result of chance and intuition." "Photography is my ritual in life and my passion; my way of life," she summarizes her sweet relationship with the camera and her own images. Her poetic gaze transforms the everyday into the magical with images of haunting beauty that "reinterpret" reality in the essential black and white with which she captures life's truth, its pain, and its joy.

A friend of Cartier-Bresson, she reinterprets the decisive moment theory of the French master. "For me, there are two decisive moments: the first when I am surprised and take the image; then in the lab, when I review my contacts and choose," says Iturbide. This is how she found the 'Angel Woman' crossing the Sonoran desert with a radio, "listening to Rigo Tovar," one of her most widely shared images. "The desert gave her to me, that's why I love her so much." "I didn't see her until I developed the contact," she admits.

She continues to work in analogue, using chemical film for her Leica M6, Rolleiflex, and Mamiya, developing and printing her copies herself. She has dabbled "with light colors," she jokes, but never abandons her universe of greys. "The fascinating thing about black and white is that it is an abstraction," says the photographer who claims to dream in black and white as well.

Trained as an assistant to the master photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Iturbide says she looks outward and inward with her camera. Her self-portraits with snakes in her mouth or birds in her eyes are evidence of this. In the haunting 'Eyes to Fly?' (1989), she photographs herself with a dead hummingbird over her left eye and a live one over her right. She cheerfully recounts that the day she took the snapshot "she was a bit depressed." "I found a dead bird at home and thought: I need a live bird." "Are you going to be able to keep photographing?" her subconscious asked. The answer was to 'fly' to the market and buy another hummingbird, the seed of the powerful image, as surreal as it is vital, with which she conjured a creative crisis.

'Our Lady of the Iguanas' (1979) is Iturbide's most iconic photo, also known as 'The Juchiteca Medusa'. "It's me," she says of an image so powerful she feels "like a self-portrait." "It became an icon, it wanted to fly on its own," she says of the portrait of Sobeida Díaz, the Zapotec indigenous woman who ended up leaping into the third dimension as a giant statue. It is reproduced in murals in Oaxaca, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, embroidered on huipiles, the colorful indigenous blouses, and reproduced in dolls or clay figurines.

Iturbide recounts that she photographed her when the woman was going to the Juchitán market to sell the iguanas she carried on her head. The animals were alive but had their mouths sewn shut to prevent biting. As always, she photographed with the model's permission. "I have never stolen nor will I ever steal photos with a telephoto lens. I need the complicity of those I photograph," she assures. The photo "didn't come out right the first time," she explains, recalling the contact sheet with the complete sequence. "In Juchitán, women manage the economy. They are very strong, very politicized, always in protest marches and loving," specifies the photographer who has explored several native Mexican ethnic groups with her camera "from whom I learned a lot."

'Frida's Bath' is another of her best-known series, documenting the reopening of a bathroom in Frida Kahlo's Blue House in Coyoacán, where corsets, crutches, busts, and political posters were stored. "Frida was a great woman, passionate, in pain, and wonderful," she says of the Mexican painter. Iturbide warns that she is not "a Frida-maniac or mythomaniac," but in Mexico "they already call her Saint Frida and even pray to her." She was invited to photograph Kahlo's huipiles, which required artificial lighting, while Iturbide always works with natural light. While touring the house, she asked to open a door. In a bathtub, she found Frida's "objects of pain" and spent two days taking photos. "I wanted to reflect the pain she felt and how she worked with it," she says. "In Mexico, we like pain a lot," she acknowledges.

Iturbide never stops taking photos. Her interest has shifted in recent years towards rocks and botanical gardens. There are formidable ones in Mexico and Japan, but one of her stone paradises is the island of Lanzarote, which fascinated her with its contrasts and volcanic landscapes. So much so that she claims to have discovered there "the beginning and the end of the world."

With around twenty modules, the exhibition closes with 'The Sky Flies', a section where birds are good and bad omens. There are the birds that indicated she should overcome the grief for her deceased daughter and the two hummingbirds from her legendary self-portrait where the threads weaving her work converge: flight, freedom, joy and memory, death and pain.