Magic and surprise are two forces that continue to drive Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide to this day. Her career, too, began unexpectedly. In 1969, in her late twenties and a mother of three, she heard a radio announcement from Mexico’s national film school and decided to apply. She was accepted and soon became a teacher’s assistant to Manuel Álvarez Bravo, now regarded as the founder of Mexican art photography. A fascination with symbolism, the fantastical and experimentation shaped Iturbide’s work, although she soon devoted herself to documentary photography. In the early 1980s, she followed the nomadic Seri people into the Sonoran Desert for a photographic reportage. She also explored traditions deeply rooted in Mexican culture in her series La Matanza, for which she accompanied the ritual slaughter of goats in the Mixteca region. C/O Berlin now presents an overview of her body of work. Developed in close collaboration with Iturbide herself, the exhibition Eyes to Fly With brings together her most important series while placing particular emphasis on the role of women in Mexican society.
A key example is the series Juchitán de las Mujeres, created among the Indigenous Zapotec community. Over nearly ten years, Iturbide returned again and again to the small town of Juchitán in Oaxaca, forming friendships and becoming familiar with local culture. At the center of her work are women and the so-called muxes — people assigned male at birth who identify differently. In Juchitán, women and muxes hold significant political, economic and spiritual influence. Iturbide’s photographs never objectify or exoticize them. Instead, her practice is shaped by a deeply personal way of seeing. She does not approach her subjects as an anonymous outsider, but documents her own encounters and relationships with the community. Her engagement with Mexico’s most renowned artist, Frida Kahlo, was similarly respectful and subjective. Years after Kahlo’s death, Iturbide approached her former home, Casa Azul in Mexico City, as both a place of artistic presence and cultural pilgrimage. Wherever Iturbide photographs — whether in her homeland or while traveling — she creates powerful, intimate portraits defined by her empathetic and distinctive visual language. Her images move between documentation and dream. They are firmly rooted in reality, yet imbued with such poetic sensitivity that Iturbide seems intent on revealing nothing less than the quiet magic of everyday life.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Alhelí, Oaxaca, México, 1995; Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México, 1979; Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert, México, 1979 / Credit: Graciela Iturbide
C/O Berlin, Hardenbergstr.22–24, 10623 Berlin–Charlottenburg; map
Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With until 10.06.2026
@coberlin
