The Wittliff Collections will reopen its doors on July 6, but for now we can still enjoy art in the comfort of our own homes with their online exhibitions.
Thankfully the Wittliff has the largest institutional collection of photographs in the United States of one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary photographers, Graciela Iturbide. Iturbide’s photographs reveal the daily lives, customs, and rituals of Mexico’s underrepresented native cultures. Her exquisite high-contrast black-and-white prints convey the starkness of life for many of her subjects.
As I mentioned, the principal concern in Iturbide’s photographs has been the exploration and investigation of Mexico—her own cultural environment—through black-and-white photographs of landscapes and their inhabitants, abstract compositions, and self-portraits. She’s taken this knowledge all over the world, photographing in the southern United States, Peru, India, Cuba, Spain, Panama, Japan, Russia, Ecuador, and Argentina. In Iturbide’s own words she says that she looks for “surprise in ordinary things that I could have found anywhere in the world. The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves.”
Her images of Mexico’s indigenous people are poignant studies of lives within the bounds of traditional ways of life, now confronted by the contemporary world. She has also documented cholo culture in the White Fence barrio of East Los Angeles and migrants at the San Diego/Tijuana border, illuminating the bleak realities of her subjects’ search for the American Dream.
Find the fantastical in the ordinary and explore the rest of the collection Eyes to Fly With, Ojos Para Volar on the Wittliff’s online exhibition.
Chantal Lesley is a marketing and communications specialist student employee in the IT Marketing and Communications office.
