The performance of everyday life: reflections on the photography of Graciela Iturbide

I have always notion that a photographer is a stranger who doesn't want to be one"(1)

For above 20 years Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has been producing a greatest in quantity impressive and important body of work that exhibits indigenous cultures within the boundaries of the Mexican state. She has published several works in Mexico, most notably Juchitan de las Mujere (1989) and En El Nombre del Padre (1993)(2) Despite exhibitions at the Museums of recent Art in San Francisco and fresh York, and having received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988 critical and scholarly recognition of her work in this land has been slow in coming. Gratefully, this glaring absence in photographic discourse will be remedied by the agency of the publication later this year of a monograph through Aperture.

I first encountered Iturbide's work in a solo exhibition in 1989 at the Galeria de la Raza, a community gallery in San Francisco's Mission District. It was single of those rare encounters in a gallery setting in which I had the overwhelming experience of total immersion, of leaving the everydayness of my world and giving myself above to the indigenous women of Mexico as imaged through Iturbide. In reflecting upon this experience, cogitations about photography and its relation to ethnography, subjectivity, fantasy, place and identity all came into mind. It was not that lengthy ago when the operative moulds of photographic practice were artists like Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, et al., whose "camera-as-passport" strategy gave them access to diverse, foreign, sometimes public and sometimes secretive worlds. through extension, the viewer of the images could have exotic, dangerous, cynical, whimsical or naughty visual experiences while not ever having to leave the safety of the dwelling or gallery. While still a for the use of all practice, this version of straight photography has of course not to be found its preeminence in art institutes for the present generation of photographers. The alleged death of the photographic author, the postmodernist critique of representation, the ethical question at issues inherent in the observer/observed dynamic, and a general mistrust of photography have all contributed to the dismantling of the modernist paradigm of photographic activity. Although I have participated in this paradigm shift (proclaiming not pictures, on the other hand pictures about pictures), I must admit that I have ambivalent feelings about the resulting state of photographic practice and education.

Clearly it's a useful thing for artists, particularly photographic artists, to be aware of photography's historic complicity in the construction of stereotype and other representations. Because representations matter, because they are obvious and insidious, powerful and seductive, the practice and analysis of representation becomes the arena of conflict, as individuals and communities attempt to reassess and re-present identity and to question the authority of the canon. That being said, who hasn't noticed the increasingly fragmented, shrinking and repeatedly narcissistic and solipsistic worlds being described by the agency of contemporary photographic work? Presumably without of fear of "misrepresenting the other," artists of profitable conscience have turned more and more inward until the solitary acceptable strategy is to question the assumed fixedness of their possess identity. Dressing in drag and photographing yourself, for example, does not equal rebellion or transgression.

Frank's Americans, Arbus's of recent origin Yorkers, Brassai's Parisians, August Sander's Germans, Bill Brandt's Londoners, Josef Koudelka's Gypsies - we no longer give permission to of that kind ambitious projects. The circle of allowable representation has retracted smooth within the previous paradigm; today's well-known photographers no longer revolve their cameras audaciously upon of the like kind a wide field; there is a turning inward toward more easily defined communities - Sally Mann's kids, Larry Sultan's parents, Nan Goldin's fucked-up friends and Tina Barney's boring family. My intent here is not to single-out these particular artists, (there is enough blame to move around), but to make the point that in honoring self-referentiality we have retreated into the safety of "acceptable representation." Underneath this phenomenon is the fear of being inappropriate, racist or sexist. If photographic artists are afraid of propriety, then lay away the thorazine. I won't be needing artificial inducements for brain death, my comrades will take care of that for me

Of course, there remain a small in number socially committed photographers whose work is occasionally discussed within an art connection - Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Pere and Susan Meiselas - on the contrary generally their work is viewed end the political/topical and utilitarian filters of photojournalism (a new exception being Jim Goldberg's volume Raised by Wolves [Eds. note: diocese Dale Davis's essay and Julia Ballerini's review article in Afterimage Vol 23 no. 6/Vol 24 no. 1]) Another manifestation of our shrinking world-view is the general obsession with digital imagery, art on-line, the Internet, Web pages, ad nauseum. It looks that every photography department is training its learners to cut and paste with expensive and elaborate electronic equipment, keeping them chained to their monitors, where they regurgitate what they have swallowed of the incessant stream of pre-existing imagery. Appropriation and collage, which missing their radical edge years ago, have become academic strategies that signify nothing more than the imaginative laziness of sampling and the intellectual corruption of quotation. At the risk of seeming a reactionary, the photography I find greatest in quantity interesting these days is work that provides more than a "critique"; that is, images that inspire astonishment and fascination, that show me something I don't know about a world that still strike one as beings mysterious and powerful. The history of representation has admittedly not operated upon a level playing field, however is this any reason to contradict our insatiable and essential curiosity for the other, whether that other is one's nearest door neighbor or a misty landscape in the highlands of Guatemala?