Graciela Iturbide

The colonial town square of Coyoacán faces the sprawling house of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, an omnipresent reminder that this quiet suburb of Mexico City, the home of photographer Graciela Iturbide, was once a blood-soaked battlefield. I meet Iturbide in a small, outdoor restaurant on the square; then— fortified with good Mexican coffee—we get up together to stroll Coyoacán. The first thing Iturbide points out to me is the house of La Malinche, Cortés’s interpreter and mistress. La Malinche’s house, a sun-baked red, stands as silent testimony that Coyoacán was more than a location for hundreds of years of brutal occupation—it was also a place where the two great cultures of Europe and America first and finally, irretrievably, mixed.

“I think all Mexicans are fascinated by La Malinche,” Iturbide tells me. “They either love her or they hate her. And that’s precisely what I find intriguing about her: her ambiguity. I was once taking photographs at a festival in Oaxaca where people were dancing the ritual dance of Moctezuma, and I noticed two girls in costume—one dressed in the garb of an indigenous Indian and the other dressed as a Spaniard of the Golden Age. I asked them who they were and what they represented and they both said that they were La Malinche. So I asked them, why two Malinches? And they answered that one of them, the one dressed as a Spaniard, was the one who betrayed. And the other was the one who didn’t.” “Why do you think she betrayed her people?” I ask.

“I think all Mexicans are fascinated by La Malinche,”

“She was a highly intelligent woman,” Iturbide answers. “And apparently there was an immense passion between her and Cortés. She lived with him, and she had children with him. And so, to me, the interesting issue is not why she betrayed, but how she symbolizes our culture. La Malinche was the mother of this new nation because we are the children, the grandchildren, and the greatgrandchildren of Spaniards who came to Mexico. And we have inherited this ambiguity of love and hatred for the Spaniards, because we all have a little bit of them in us.”

As we leave the colonial precinct of the town square we wind up a dusty road, past sleeping dogs and ragged children, and finally approach a house as loaded with symbolism for Graciela Iturbide as the house of La Malinche. “I was lucky enough to meet Manuel Alvarez Bravo,” Iturbide tells me as we approach his front door. “He was teaching photography and his course was completely empty. Hardly anyone was interested in still photography.”

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One of Mexico’s most famous photographers, Bravo is ninetytwo, but he still works in his studio every day from late morning to early afternoon, sifting through his collection of prints, developing the pictures he still shoots on the streets of Coyoacán, all the while listening intently to classical music. Today, it is Telemann.

“Telemann once said something interesting,” Bravo recalls. “He said that every musician must be whistling something at all times. Well, I say that every photographer must be living at all times.”

Half kidding, I ask him why a photographer should take advice from a musician.

“I believe that all the arts are related,” Bravo replies. “They are all branches of the same tree. But when you really look at a work of art you get pulled inside—and at that moment you’re not thinking about anything but that specific work.”

“And your photography,” I ask. “Does it emanate from that place inside? Or is it outside, waiting for you?”

“It goes in through my eye,” says Bravo, “and out through my camera.”

“How beautiful!” Iturbide exclaims. “That was beautiful, what you just said.” And they both break into peals of laughter.

Later, after we say goodbye, Iturbide and I start on toward her own house, and she recalls the early days with Bravo. “He always told me, ‘Graciela, you have to go to exhibits, you have to buy art books. You need to know how painters compose.’ He told me that in order to create photographs, I had to be filled with all the arts.”

We pass a tiny, colonial church clinging to the side of one of Coyoacán’s small, steep hills. We hear children’s voices rising from within, so we approach and peer past the carved wooden doors and there they are, holding candles, walking single file, circling the little chapel, stopping and adoring each saint. I ask Iturbide if she remembers the Catholic rituals of her own childhood and she tells me that she went to a school run by nuns.

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“At the end of the school year they would play classical music and the bishop would place crowns of flowers on the girls’ heads—all in silence. Then we’d walk through the patio of the school towards the chapel to deposit the crowns in the church. It was just like a Fellini movie. And all those garlands they put on us, all the silent rituals, they all come out when I am shooting— especially when I am shooting angels.

“I love the idea of angels,” she continues, “but I can only believe in this world. I believe that this is it, but I like everything associated with the hereafter. I like the paraphernalia. You can deny the religion, but the aesthetic part of it always stays with you, like a mark.

“I can remember the fantastic, ritual aspect of my childhood. I come from a family of bishops and archbishops, and at my aunt’s house, they would all come with their rings and their tiaras. I loved it.”

“When did you become an atheist?” I ask.

“When I started living in the real Mexico. I saw the injustices and I couldn’t confront the living world from my crystal palace any longer. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to go to churches, or that I don’t like to take pictures of children dressed as angels.”

We have finally arrived at Iturbide’s white stucco house. Designed by one of her two sons, it is high-vaulted, stippled with windows and plastered outcroppings for the carved icons and life-size wooden angels she collects. Her archive, her bedroom, and her darkroom are located up the central spiral staircase. We sit downstairs, listening to Gregorian chants, sipping from saltrimmed glasses of beer spiked with lime juice, gazing out the tall windows at her courtyard of lush succulents. Iturbide tells me that she grafted her plants from the garden of Frida Kahlo’s house, not too many blocks away in Coyoacán. Then Iturbide disappears up those spiral stairs to find a few of her favorite images.

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The first one she shows me is Mujer Angel (Angel woman). “This is my favorite photograph,” she tells me. “I can distinctly remember the moment I took the picture. It was like a gift life gave me. There was the music from her cassette, her hair was all tangled up— and it seemed as though she was flying. It was one of those moments CartierBresson refers to when he talks about photography, the moment one is not really conscious of.”

I ask her to tell me more about the woman in the shot and Iturbide explains that she comes from the Seri tribe of the Sonoran desert.

“The Seris are in constant contact with the United States, especially with people in Arizona. Many Americans come to buy the work of the artisans— which explains why they have not only money, but gadgets like cassette recorders. They love to walk around the desert listening to music. This photograph symbolizes a moment that is particular to the Seris, because this traditional woman is set within the modern world. She’s trying to cross the desert—and it seems as though she is going to fall.”

I ask her if her photographs of women are ever political.

“It all goes together,” she tells me. “Your aesthetics, your politics, your morals, your sexuality. I have a very strong consciousness of being a woman and I have worked at times with feminists, but I am not a feminist. I do feel that my photography is feminine, but I have no interest in taking a photograph that baldly proclaims the feminist agenda. At any given time I can fight for the problems of the women who are exploited in Mexico or anywhere else in the world, but my position is not particularly feminist.”

She shows me another of her favorite pictures: a woman stands in a river holding a knife and the immaculate white body of an unborn goat, cut from the body of its slaughtered mother. She says, “I call this photograph El Sacrificio [The sacrifice]. It was not posed.”

I ask her to tell me more about the goat-slaughtering ritual she documented in her short but powerful book, In the Name of the Father.

“The slaughtering of the goats came from the Spaniards,” Iturbide explains. “There were no goats here before the Spaniards came, but it soon became a substantial business. The Indians made it into a ritual. They pray before they kill it, they put flowers on its head. I think they are asking for forgiveness.

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“Before I traveled to Mixteca to do this specific project I spent a lot of time reading the Bible. I knew that I wanted to refer to the sacrifice of Isaac. And I knew that I wanted to salvage the poetic part of the ritual. I wanted to achieve an image that would represent what the sacrifice means to me, an image that would somehow hold everything that I was holding inside of me.”

I ask her how she approaches indigenous populations, how she gains their trust.

“I’m not one of those photographers who shoots with a telephoto, I’m not a photographer who hides. I usually get to a town with my camera and I introduce myself as a photographer. I tell the people that I plan to stay for a while. I live with them in their homes and they know what I am there for. I tell them that I am going to photograph their rituals, their traditions. I like it when people know that I am taking their picture. Complicity, for me, is looking at someone and discovering that they are looking back. If I don’t have that answering look, I don’t get results.”

“And when you get that answering look and are taking pictures,” I ask, “then what are you thinking about?”

“When I’m taking pictures I even forget that I have a camera. When I shoot I forget about everything. Light comes, death comes, people go in and out in costume—and it’s like a play.”

“If it’s a play,” I note, “then you’re on the road with it.”

“In Mexico there is always some festival, so I do travel a lot. Of course, in Mexico, death and festivals intermix. I believe that the Mexican people are very scared of death—and that’s why they play with it so much. In the cemeteries, people bury their loved ones with songs and feasts, and death becomes a party. On the Day of the Dead we eat sugar skulls. And I’ve found that whenever I go to a festival I always see one or two individuals dressed as Death. And then there’s the real death one encounters on the road, the real violence.

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The only way to kill death is through photography. —Jean Cocteau

“There is a phrase of Jean Cocteau’s that impresses me, a phrase I often think about: ‘The only way to kill death is through photography.’”