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ZRacial IturbidePictures growl, scream and thunder from the unspeakable corners of the soul. The primal scream of a baby as it lies in the backseat of a car waiting for milk to be prepared by its mother is captured in one shot. But his mother is deaf—one of several deaf women related to the Mexican American White Fence Gang in Los Angeles, whom Iturbide met and photographed in 1986.
Iturbides is a master of metaphor and allegory. The first image encountered in Shadowlines – a rare UK institutional showcase of the 82-year-old Mexican artist – is of a blindfolded woman sitting in a chair in a living room somewhere in the matriarchal community of Juchitán in Mexico. Unusually for a photographer, Iturbide is intrigued by sensations that lie beyond sight; she channels the visions of the inner worlds. These places are often dark and mysterious – but Iturbide is as fearless as they come.
Next to the blindfolded woman named Doña Guadalupe, another figure emerges from the most inky, seeping blackness, standing on a crumbling doorway, holding a bull’s skull. The remarkable depth and shades of black, a testament to Iturbide’s mastery of the darkroom, allow only a glimpse of this eerie female figure and its setting – one foot in an elegant sandal, a painting hanging on the wall in the background. This 1986-1987 painting Mujer Toro, in which the bull’s skull almost floats in obsidian, is an eerie reminder of a life that will never return. Everything is dead in the picture.
Death is an eternal condition that always marks the corners of Iturbide’s pictures. There are harbingers of death – angels, calaveras, a woman dangling a dead chicken as she walks past a blood-spattered wall, photographs of mourners performing cemetery rituals, sets for many of Iturbide’s works in the 1970s and 1980s. Dark clouds of birds, another foreboding motif, recurs in several works from different periods. Then there’s Iturbide’s indisputable masterpiece, the eerie Angel Woman shot on Pentax in the Sonoran Desert in 1979 – the hunched figure of the woman, more Reaper than savior, with her back to the camera forming the shape of a crucifix against the landscape . There are encounters with death that are harder to bear: a child”the angel”, wrapped lovingly and small in her coffin, photographed in Guanajuato in 1978. Iturbide lost her daughter Claudia, aged six, in 1970. She photographed child funerals for almost a decade after the tragedy.
Although Iturbide photographed all over the world, this exhibition shows that her best work was done in Mexico. Although she grew up Catholic in the urban, cosmopolitan city of Mexico City, the remote and spiritual landscapes of Oaxaca and Juchitan seem to ignite her vision most vividly. The works she made there in the late 1970s and 1980s stand out—mostly portraits of indigenous women and children with whom she lived, learned, and healed. Iturbide was among the first to preserve its cultural practices in photography.
But wherever Iturbide goes with his camera, it’s hard to escape a sense of fatalism, mystery, and melancholy. Her cinematic tone—always stopping short of the kind of yearning or theatricality that dominated documentary photography of the same period—owes in part to the photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, with whom Iturbide trained. Yet, unlike Alvarez Bravo’s more traditionally perfect compositions, there is always something odd about Iturbide’s images: the windswept hair and skirt of the woman in the Lizard; the hand that interrupts the glitter of a glittering carpet of fish. At the center of an image taken from the backseat of a moving vehicle in Chalma, Mexico, in 1984, is a reflection in the mirror—a terrifying masked face, a thriller in one shot. It shows how Iturbide experiments with visual tricks, from mirrors to darkroom techniques, finding ways to play with what you see and what you don’t. Even when there is silence, it is loaded with suggestions of violence.
Iturbide’s anti-fiction shows a world that is harsh and prickly. Even as she gradually moved away from portraiture in the 1990s to a more abstract and architectural language, her motifs expressed these same concerns. Another perfect Iturbide metaphor comes in a later series shot in the late 1990s at the Oaxaca Botanical Garden. These anthropomorphic portraits of cacti show their jagged spines gently wrapped in newspaper and tied with wood to protect them from the harsh environment. Even that which appears violent or threatening is vulnerable to uncontrollable forces.
Iturbide’s images grab you fiercely by the throat and won’t let go. Time – unlike the railway clock frozen forever at 10:2 in a photo taken in the Czech Republic – does not stand still. You don’t come to Iturbide for comfort or joy. You come to hear the death knell ring. You can either run and hide or stand and listen.
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