The Wall Street Journal-20080129-Iturbide-s Intimate Portraits- Surreal but True
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Iturbide's Intimate Portraits, Surreal but True
Full Text (872 words)Los Angeles -- Graciela Iturbide wasn't the first artist to be obsessively drawn to the women of Juchitan, a Zapotec Indian town in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. But as seen in "The Goat's Dance," a large and enthralling exhibition of three decades of her work at the Getty Center, she was the first to do these larger-than- life women justice in photographs.
It's a woman's world in Juchitan and the surrounding areas on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Women run the markets and the government while their menfolk do the farming and stay home with the kids. Many a 20th- century artist made a pilgrimage to this thriving matriarchal culture in search of a muse among women who flaunt their economic and sexual freedom. Frida Kahlo was one of them, and in fact it was from the Tehuanas that she borrowed her iconic style and self-image: long, embroidered skirt and blouse, extravagant jewelry, braided hair and indomitable spirit.
Edward Weston found his way south in 1926 during his Mexican sojourn, followed in 1929 by his lover, Italian photographer Tina Modotti. The late, great Mexican master Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Modotti's friend and, later, Ms. Iturbide's mentor, made the trip with his camera in the 1930s, as did Cartier-Bresson. Weston and Modotti both made memorable close-up portraits of striking women with large bowls balanced on their heads (even though Weston's subject was actually an American dancer in Tehuana costume).
But despite all the masters who came before her, it was Ms. Iturbide -- who was born in 1942 and is now considered one of Mexico's most important living artists -- who made both the definitive body of work and the single most unforgettable photo of the Tehuanas. Like her predecessors' portraits, her signature image is close-up, bust-length and shot from below in a heroic style. Yet her subject balances not a ceramic bowl but a gaggle of live, perfectly posed iguanas, spiking out from her head like a thorny crown.
"Our Lady of the Iguanas" (1979) was taken when Ms. Iturbide spotted the iguana seller at the market, transporting the animals -- which made for a tasty meal in those parts -- on her head, and asked her to pose. (This was the only one of 12 shots in which the iguanas sat up and posed as well.) The resulting image is exotic and powerful, the very qualities that outsiders have always admired in the indigenous women of the isthmus.
Their power is the stuff of legend, but Ms. Iturbide also caught the stuff of life: a mountain of a woman in a polka-dot skirt chuckling to herself as she lifts a cerveza to her mouth; a woman with painted fingernails gutting a rabbit with a kitchen knife; a group of women at one of their frequent fiestas, arms wrapped lovingly around each other, staring confidently into the camera; a transvestite in a long dress admiring himself in a hand mirror (as he is free to do openly in this culture where male transvestites have their own fiestas).
These are intimate portraits, made over a period of a decade beginning in 1979. That these people were so comfortable with Ms. Iturbide -- a small woman by any measure and particularly by the standards of the sizable women of the isthmus -- is amazing. (Subsequent experience with journalists has taught them to be leery of visitors wielding cameras or pens.)
Ms. Iturbide "grew up comfortable, beautiful and bound for a traditional marriage in Mexico City," as curator Judith Keller put it in the catalog. But after a divorce and the tragic death of a young daughter, she turned to photography -- and particularly to photographing women -- to picture her own place in the world.
She found her destiny first when working as Alvarez Bravo's assistant and later when painter Francisco Toledo asked her to photograph the women of his native Juchitan. But she also found it among Chicana gang members while staying with them in 1986 for her series on East Los Angeles.
As with the Tehuanas, Iturbide lets these women speak for themselves. In "Cholas, White Fence, East L.A." her four female Mexican-American subjects stand in front of a mural of the heroes of the Mexican revolution (who they thought were local mariachis) with tough stances and defiant faces, flashing their gang's hand signs, one of them holding a baby. In other images, their signing becomes even more potent as you realize that they are also deaf.
In one respect Ms. Iturbide's oeuvre, almost all of it black-and- white, is documentary -- it falls into the best story-telling tradition of that style. But it is also defiantly subjective. Study "The Goat's Dance" (1992), a series in which she follows the complete cycle of the ritual slaughtering of the goats and the attendant celebration in another Oaxacan community.
In one photo, a woman who has sliced open a live goat holds the bloodied animal down with her hands and one leg, while clenching the knife blade in her teeth, a rhinestone earring dangling from her ear. It is an unflinching portrait of life and death in all its beautiful, surreal and supremely Mexican glory.
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Ms. Holliday writes about travel and the arts.
