The Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, who received the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts this Friday, said that she considers herself a “citizen of the world,” like photography, an art to which she has dedicated her life and that, “fortunately, knows no borders.”
“Fortunately, photographic art knows no borders, nor does it have a passport, nor does it need visas, even though some powerful men try to limit free transit between countries and restrict the freedom to think and create,” he said during the awards ceremony at the Campoamor Theater in Oviedo (northern Spain).
Iturbide, author of such iconic snapshots as ‘Our Lady of the Iguanas’, ‘Eyes to Fly’ or ‘Angel Woman’, confessed that she felt “very honored” to receive the award for a feat “as circumstantial” as spending “more than half a century” of her life looking at the world through “a small window of just a few square centimeters.”
The Mexican mused that photography is not the truth, but an “interpretation” of a reality that the artist “apprehends based on his knowledge, his emotions, his dreams and his intuition.”
For this reason, everything he has photographed has “filled his spirit” and generated a feeling of “understanding” that has become a “good excuse” to get to know the world and its cultures, and, more specifically, his country, Mexico, and its indigenous world.
A firm defender of mestizaje, of which she considers herself an exponent, the author said that, “like the majority of Mexicans,” she is the result of “the fusion between two cultures” that are “two “almost always found” visions of the world.
The photographer paid tribute to the Spanish intellectuals who, as a result of the Civil War, arrived in Mexico and enriched the country with “their talents and knowledge.”
A reflection of Mexico through your eyes
Iturbide does not feel “owner” of her images, nor is she afraid that they will be used or “even manipulated,” said the photographer, who pointed out that, although many of her snapshots are already part of the Mexican imagination, they are only “a reflection of Mexico” sifted through her gaze.
“If when they see my photos, people say: ‘This is Mexico’, I answer: ‘No, this is Graciela Iturbide,’ condensed the award-winner, recognized for being the ‘owner of an innovative look’ in which she combines documentary with a poetic sense of the image and with which she achieves images that ‘not only show what she sees, but also what she feels.’
This is what interests an artist who seeks poetry, more than magic, in her photography, and who, as she confessed, has “never” constructed an image: they have all been “the fruit of chance and the result of an encounter.”
“Photography plays with an ambiguity: it reveals a fragment of reality that I try to reveal again, in order not to squander the mystery it contains,” Iturbide stressed.
With information from EFE.
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