Mexican photographer wins 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts

Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide wins 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts
Oviedo (EFE).- Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, one of the great names in artistic photography with social and cultural inspiration, received the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts on Friday.

Considered one of the most important and influential photographers in Latin America, Iturbide (Mexico City, 1942) conceives her work as a way of knowing, exploring and investigating cultures with works, almost always in black and white, that show the fragility of ancestral traditions and their difficult subsistence, the interaction between nature and culture or the symbolic dimension of landscapes and objects found by chance.

Over the course of her career spanning more than half a century, she portrayed indigenous peoples in Mexico, Panama, Madagascar, and Cuba, creating an intense and unique body of work that is fundamental to understanding the evolution of photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

In 1969, she began her studies at the University Center for Cinematographic Studies at the Autonomous University of Mexico with the intention of becoming a film director, but after learning about the work of photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo and attending his classes, she felt drawn to the discipline.

In the 1970s, she traveled throughout Latin America, mainly to Cuba and Panama, and in 1978 she was hired by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to document the country's indigenous population with projects in which she photographed, for example, the Seri and Juchitán peoples.

Later, Iturbide continued her work in Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France, and the United States, a period that resulted in numerous works notable for their artistic depth and poetic sense.

Over time, her taste for portraiture and the description of human nature changed in search of new subjects, such as landscapes or found objects, which her gaze endowed with a transcendental vision through her characteristic use of black and white. In her own words, photography is “a ritual” for her. “Going out with the camera, observing, photographing the most mythological aspects of people, then going into the darkness, developing, selecting the most symbolic images,” she added. For the jury that today unanimously awarded her the Princess of Asturias Award, Iturbide is “the owner of an innovative look” in which she combines documentary with a poetic sense of the image and with which she obtains images that “not only show what she sees, but also what she feels.” Iturbide has held solo exhibitions at some of the most important art centers and institutions in the world, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Barbican Art Gallery, among others.

The Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, which was awarded last year to Spanish singer Joan Manuel Serrat, aims to recognize “the work of creation, cultivation and improvement of architecture, cinema, dance, sculpture, photography, music, painting, theater and other artistic expressions”.

The Princess of Asturias Awards, with a total of eight categories, are of great international importance and are named after one of the titles of the heir to the Spanish throne, currently Princess Leonor. EFE
Categories Culture, Other news Tags Spain, Mexico
Source