(May 16, 1942, Mexico City, Mexico)

María Graciela del Carmen Iturbide Guerra is a Mexican photographer. He was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969 she entered the University Center for Cinematographic Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to become a film director. However, she was soon attracted to the art of photography practiced by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who taught at the same university. From 1970 to 1971 he worked as his assistant, accompanying him on trips through Mexico and, later, through Latin America, in particular to Cuba and Panama.

In 1978, it was commissioned by the Scenographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to document the country’s indigenous population. Iturbide decided to photograph the Seri people, a group of nomadic fishermen who live in the Sonora desert in northwestern Mexico and close to the Arizona border.

In 1979 she was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to photograph the town of Juchitán, which is part of the Zapotec culture in Oaxaca, in the Mexican southeast. The series started in 1979 and continued until 1988 resulted in the publication of the book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Between 1980 and 2000 she was invited to work in Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, Paris and the United States, producing a important number of works.

In 2004, fifty years after the death of Frida Kahlo, she was invited to leave photographic evidence of the opening of two bathrooms with objects and documents of the artist, closed by Diego Rivera in 1954. The whole of the work gave origin of the series Frida’s bath, published in 2009.

He has exhibited individually at the Center Pompidou (1982), the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (1990), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997), the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2007), the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid (2009), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2009) and the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2012), among others.

Iturbide has received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Foundation Award, 1987; the Grand Prize Mois de la Photo, Paris, 1988; the Guggenheim Fellowship for the Fiesta y Muerte project, 1988; the Hugo Erfurth Award, Leverkusen, Germany, 1989; the International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan, 1990; the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie award, Arles, 1991; the Hasselblad Prize, 2008; the National Prize for Sciences and Arts, Mexico, 2008; Doctor Honoris Causa in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2008; and the Doctor Honoris Causa in Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009; full member of the Academy of Arts as of 2014.