The work of the award-winning Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide was exhibited in London in August at the Photographer’s Gallery. One of her photos, shown in The Prisma’s review of the exhibition, was of four women standing in front of a wall mural of Benito Juárez and Villa y Zapata.
Sean Sheehan
The Latino street gang that the women belong to and Iturbide’s fascination with them is the subject of “White fence”.
Graciela Iturbide, born in 1942 in Mexico City, gained international renown with the publication of her book, “Juchitán de las mujeres”, with photographs of indigenous tribes of Mexico. Three years earlier, in 1986, she had gained attention with another book, “A day in the life of America”. Her images in that book came about when she was part of a team of photographers who over the course of twenty-four hours registered ordinary life in different parts of the US. Iturbide found herself photographing in a flat in Boyle Heights, a neighbourhood in Los Angeles’ Eastside, and this was her introduction to a group of Chicano (Mexican American) women, members of the White Fence street gang.
Iturbide is not the outsider, the voyeur with a lens, and this is essential to the quality of her work:
“I never take photos in secret and I’ve never used a telephoto lens. My subjects always know I’m there as a photographer and, if I feel someone doesn’t want their picture taken, then I don’t take it.”
A gang had established itself in Boyle Heights at the beginning of the twentieth century and the name stuck, being still in use when Iturbide was in their territory with her camera. She remained in contact with the community and returned intermittingly to take more photos and reunite with the women who had welcomed her into their lives. An essay in “White fence” by Alfonso Morales Carrillo covers the development of Iturbide’s engagement with the women and describes how communities of Mexican descent developed and remained north of the Rio Grande.
The title of a review of the exhibition in a UK newspaper, “Graciela Iturbide’s surrealist take on Mexico”, is misleading in suggesting that strangeness and the unreal is what her work is about. “I don’t like magical realism’ she has stated and, being brought up a Catholic (‘I am no longer religious’), “it could be that I have a spiritual instinct”. If so, it is a spiritualism based on materialist observations of life.
Boyle Heights, the location in “White fence”, is now undergoing gentrification, being close to downtown Los Angeles. It is a working-class neighbourhood with a Latino character coming from a history of poverty and immigration.
The sense of a shared heritage comes across strongly in the photographs and its signifiers of street gang life – tattoos, gang signs, defiant gestures – are there in acknowledgement of a cultural history rooted in disenfranchisement and vilification.
“White fence” by Graciela Iturbide is published by Editorial RM
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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