Images of the spirit

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	• Images of the Spirit Aperture, 1996 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Images of the spirit

If you love black and white photography this book is excellent.Beautiful images of Mexico and portraits of its people.

"We-are-others"

First of all lets begin by stating that the images in this book are profoundly beautiful, framed with an incredible eye, the subjects positioned for some remarkably,imaginative imagery and overall some of the most moving photographs I have ever seen. Graciela Iturbide comes to her success with the lense by assisting the master Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo in the early 1970's. Graciela Iturbide makes the conections between Mexican Americans in the United States and Mexicans in Mexico. Her photography shows the similarities, the differences and the cultural ties and aberrations reflected in her works. Her photographs of some of the White Fence cholos from East Los Angeles are graphic glimpses of the hard core lifestyle. The pictures have a documentary style, the people come to life, it seems as though the home girls or vatos are going to say, orale ese, any second. Iturbide is comfortable with her subject matter. In one epic photograph she chooses a relaxed barfly, cigarette in hand, shot glass near by, sitting in a Mexican dive, with a surreal ,swirled, mural in the background, complete with religious imagery and hospital beds, dominated by a headstone that says R.I.P. The religious festivals capture an eerie quality that haunts the viewer. At her best Iturbide juxtaposes various elements in one photograph, contrasting the simplicity, exagerrating and blurring the lines of reality. The image of a young girl at a quinceniera(celebration fro turning 15) and an ancient old woman in the foreground, while in the dark background of another room two ghostly youths peer in are typical of the amazing framing Graciela Iturbide achieves. Her ability to position things in a picture is always perfect composition. Her shots evolving around Day of the Dead are magical. In one photograph of a cemetary in Chila, Puebla it is as though the fog is moving in a still picture stirred by the ghosts of the past. Her uncanny ability to create something that is but isn't is surreal. For example, in one photograph entitled "Nuestra Senora de las Iguanas," eight iguanas form the crown of an Indian woman from Oaxaca as the picture is shot bust level, from below, with the iguanas looking out at the viewer. These pictures in this book are a look at traditional ways of living and modern life, nature landscapes in natural and unnatural states, the duality of culture and a reflection of the Mexican people and a reaffirmation of life. A truly mind blowing set of photographs in beautiful and brutal black and white await your purchase.

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Graciela Iturbide makes subtle yet powerful photographs that blend evocative scenes, primarily the cultures of her native Mexico, with her own deeply personal vision. Images of the Spirit, the first major publication of Iturbide's photography, demonstrates how in her dreamlike encounters with what may first appear to be ordinary, she perceives the surreal and the marvelous. Iturbide's work is a mixture of history, lyricism, and portraiture, sometimes informed by the art of Mexico's photographic master, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In Iturbide's photographs, she combines the story of a culture in transition with issues of identity, diversity, and selfhood.

As the poet and critic Roberto Tejada points out in his Preface, "Sidelong Mirrors and Invisible Masks," Iturbide's photographs "underline time and again the rift between belonging and citizenship, rendered often against a backdrop of Mexican icons or heroes--be it the frail displacement of a rural campesino in Puebla, or the triumph of locals in East Los Angeles." Tejada who has lived in Mexico for the last ten years, provides a trenchant illumination of this Mexican photographer's use of her country's lore and stories of conquest, it's pre-Hispanic past, its indigenous visual vocabulary, and its centuries of tradition and ceremony, often infused with Christian iconography.

Writer and scholar Alfredo López Austin is an anthropologist studying Latin American cultures. In his series of letters to Iturbide, which form the poetic Epilogue to Images of the Spirit, he envisions her "on a promontory set over the world in such a way as to see from one ocean to the other, to approach the vault of heaven and to surpass the artificial boundaries." Reflecting on the breadth of her expansive, insightful mind while invoking many narrative voices and identities drawn from Mexico's richly vibrant mythologies, López Austin shows us how Iturbide's photographs mirror the artist herself. Through his writing Iturbide is revealed as observer, searcher, affirmer.

Images of the Spirit is produced at the highest level of the printer's art, enhancing the resonance of Iturbide's imagery, and the luminosity of her vision. Iturbide's compassion and dedication to her native land and its people make Images of the Spirit a power evocation of the underlying forces inspiring the complex, diverse, and ever-changing cultural landscape of Mexico.

This aperture publication accompanies a traveling exhibition that opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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