Graciela Iturbide: Portals

Graciela Iturbide, Self-Portrait, Mexico, 1989

Graciela Iturbide folds dream into photography without restraint. Her images don’t just document — they conjure. A woman holds an owl, another veils herself against the desert sky, a gaze half here and half elsewhere. Her photographs insist that vision can be both literal and mythic, rooted in earth but edged with the surreal (remarkable).

The women she frames are of this world…and not. Mortal yet mythic, ordinary yet exalted. They don’t pose as archetypes so much as channel them, carrying molecular-level wisdom without the need to prove it. Birds appear often in her work — not as ornament, but as emissaries, signaling the porousness between the seen and the unseen. Each photograph feels like a portal, opening onto a threshold where sensation and myth overlap.

I think about this as I work, letting her freedom of expression get under my skin. The reminder that women are more than flesh, more than survival (survival is a low bar anyway). They are visionaries, bodies that carry legend into the now.