I'm always looking for the accident of the surreal. The world around, as it is, creates these accidents. It's called unpredictability. So many surrealists create the accident whether through staged lighting or actors. Iturbide embraces the unpredictable.
This unpredictability is what draws me to Iturbide. She has worked all over the world but is best known for the photographic projects she has undertaken in her native Mexico since the 1970s. Like most convincingly surreal photographs, Iturbide’s are often ostensibly about something else: the lives of Zapotec people in the matriarchal communities of Juchitán, for instance, or the customs of Seri people in the Sonoran Desert. But out of these quasi-anthropological engagements, she arrives at images that seem to contain other forms of knowing. Her photographs are firmly of this world — birds in flight, children dressed up as angels, animals at the moment of sacrifice — but they have an expectant and otherworldly air.
Graciela Iturbide