05/08/2026
Good morning from Guatemala City. 🇬🇹
Yesterday, after landing for the first time in Guatemala City, we walked directly into one of the most quietly powerful photography exhibitions I have encountered in recent memory — and I say this having seen several retrospectives of this work, in Mexico City and most recently at ICP New York last year.
Graciela Iturbide is on view at in her first exhibition ever in Guatemala. The show runs through July 18, 2026, curated by Elena Navarro, and arrives carried by the momentum of the Premio Princesa de Asturias de las Artes 2025 — the prestigious recognition awarded annually by the Kingdom of Spain to individuals whose contributions to culture, science, and the humanities have reached international significance. Iturbide received it for a photographic career spanning six decades that has permanently altered what documentary photography can be, and what it owes to the communities it enters.
The first thing that confronts you upon entering is not a photograph. It is a wall — a long, monumental timeline painted in acid chartreuse green, running her full biographical arc from birth in Mexico City in 1942 to last year. That color is not decorative. It is a decision, and it is the right one. Chartreuse belongs to this geography: the milpa field under morning light, the wet season canopy, the tropical vegetation that defines Central American visual experience. In a Mexican photographer's first appearance in Guatemala, the curatorial team has chosen to surround her biographical timeline with a color that belongs to this side of the border. It is a precise and generous act of territorial welcome — an acknowledgment that Iturbide's Mesoamerican world and Guatemala's are not separate imaginaries but overlapping ones, connected by shared indigenous cosmologies, by the same quality of highland light, by centuries of cultural exchange that no national boundary has fully interrupted.
The curatorial note frames the entire project with her own foundational claim: "For me, color is a fantasy; I see reality in black and white." This is not a stylistic preference. It is a philosophical position worth taking seriously rather than simply receiving. Color, for Iturbide, is the surface condition of the visible world — what the eye encounters first and what seduces it away from structure. Black and white is the abstraction that strips the visible to its essential conditions: light, shadow, form, and the spatial relationship between bodies. In choosing to work exclusively in this register across six decades, she is not being nostalgic for an older photographic tradition. She is making an epistemological claim about what the camera can know when it refuses the distraction of the chromatic.
From that abstraction, Iturbide observes her world — Zapotec women and muxes sharing their traditions, rituals, and popular festivals; flocks of birds crossing open skies; stealthy serpents moving through desert terrain; herds of goats assembled as if awaiting a verdict. These are not incidental subjects. They function as metaphors for life and death, for community and solitude, for the cycles of abundance and extinction that pre-Columbian thought understood as the fundamental structure of reality. Nature and the human do not occupy separate registers in her photographs — they participate in the same cosmological grammar, the same ongoing negotiation between the mortal and the enduring.
The exhibition opens with Mexico City, 1969, and that sequencing is a curatorial argument. The first image on the white wall is a woman seated at a bar, a shot glass in front of her, looking directly into the camera with complete composure. Behind her, filling the entire background, a large painted mural of a skull — baroque, elaborate — with hospital beds rendered inside the eye sockets. The collision is precise and unsettling: feminine presence, mortality, popular culture, and the Mexican tradition of death as a daily cohabitant rather than an exceptional visitor. This is an early work, made before Juchitán, before the major series. But it announces the entire practice: the refusal to separate the human from the symbolic, the willingness to let the background overwhelm and reframe the foreground figure without diminishing her.
Nearby, two photographs from the mid-1970s deepen the argument. In the first, a skull mounted on a stand sits directly beneath a tourism poster reading "México... ¡Quiero conocerte!" — Mexico, I want to know you. The state's promotional image of the country is placed immediately above a death's head. Cold, exact, closer to political surrealism than documentary photography. In the second, a headless male mannequin torso stands outside a Mercado de Sonora shop, holding a newspaper. A body without a head reading the news of a body politic. Neither image is staged. She found both of them. That is the distinction that matters. The Juchitán work did not emerge from nowhere. It was prepared by a decade of looking at how Mexican popular culture had always lived alongside mortality — how the calavera was never exceptional in this visual world but structural, present in the market, in the bar, in the street, waiting to be framed.
The museographic decision to alternate between chartreuse green walls and white walls is one of the most considered spatial choices I have encountered in a photography show in some time. The green walls hold the work connected to community and political life — the saturated social world of Juchitán de las Mujeres, the matriarchal Zapotec city in Oaxaca, where Iturbide spent nearly a decade. The white walls hold a different quality of silence: the botanical work, the animal metaphors, images that breathe more slowly. At the center of the room, a large horizontal vitrine displays oversized prints laid flat under glass — photographs of collective ritual, bodies in procession, and what appears to be the raw handling of a slaughtered animal, flesh and hands in close contact. Beside it, a wall text addresses directly what runs as an undercurrent through the entire exhibition: death not as rupture but as festivity, as communal event, as the thread that binds the living to one another and to what precedes them. The vitrine is not an archive of process — it is an altar of a different kind. A horizontal surface on which death is laid out for contemplation, at waist height, requiring you to lean in.
The exhibition ends at La Casa Azul — Frida Kahlo's house in Coyoacán, Mexico City. After decades of photographing communities in their full living density, Iturbide enters a house of silence and photographs what death leaves on a surface. The corsets, the medicine bottles, the garden in afternoon light with no one in it. The only room in the entire exhibition where the human subject is absent — and paradoxically where human presence feels most concentrated, most irreducible.
Standing in Guatemala City, in a country whose indigenous communities share deep Mesoamerican roots with the Zapotec world, Iturbide spent a decade inside. This work reads with an immediacy that surprised anyone. The visual vocabulary of the market women, of ritual and political life coexisting in the same frame, of the body as both social and cosmological subject — all of this felt immediately legible here in a way that required no mediation. The recognition a Guatemalan viewer brings to these images is not intellectual. It is bodily. It arrives before interpretation.
The trip has begun well.
📍 Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, Guatemala City
🗓 On view through July 18, 2026
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