Prior to now, in the list of recipients of the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, there was only one photographer, Sebastião Salgado, who earned it in a by now remote 1998 (Annie Leibovitz and James Nachtwey were awarded in the Communication and Humanities category). Suddenly, as if it were a given that the select club should always include a member of the eighth art, the same day that the mineiro master’s demise became known it was announced that this year’s honoree would be Graciela Iturbide. Born in Mexico City in the year 1942, she was enrolled at the film school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico when one of her teachers, the reputed cineaste and photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, awakened in her a passion for the still image. After working as his assistant for a time, she embarked on a journey across Latin America and later through her own country, commissioned by the ethnographic archive of the National Indigenous Institute to document Mexico’s cultural diversity. This resulted in one of her best known works, Juchitán de las mujeres, although her oeuvre, imbued with a fantastic aura so characteristic of the land of Juan Rulfo and Frida Kahlo, is not confined within national boundaries. Any horizon is good for her particular ‘ritual’ of capturing – necessarily in black and white, because color “feels like Disneyland” – the frontier between the real and the symbolic, lending her pictures to multiple interpretations, because more than representing the world, they intuit its mysteries.
'Cristina tomando fotos' (White Fence, Los Ángeles, 1986), imagen de Graciela Iturbide
