Mexican surrealist photographer Graciela Iturbide, Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2025

At 83, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (Mexico City, 1942) has just been awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. While not extremely well-known in Spain, she has had a long and renowned career in her country, the United States, and France, where she has stood out for her focus on indigenous cultures and Mexican folk traditions . She also focused her attention on her country's greatest artistic star: in 2004, she photographed two of Frida Kahlo 's bathrooms, which had been closed by Diego Rivera in 1954.

According to the jury's minutes, chaired by Miguel Zugaza, Iturbide was awarded - unanimously - for having "an innovative vision and endowed with extraordinary artistic depth", "Iturbide has portrayed human nature through photographs charged with symbolism, which create a world of their own: from the primitive to the contemporary; from the harshness of social reality to the spontaneous magic of the moment. Graciela Iturbide's work, in black and white, combines documentary with a poetic sense of the image. Through her camera she captures daily life in Mexico , with a deep, respectful and evocative gaze. Her images show not only what she sees, but also what she feels. Each photograph has an emotional and cultural charge that invites us to look beyond what is visible." The nomination was proposed by Juan Duarte Cuadrado , Spanish ambassador to Mexico.

The jury: "Through his camera, he captures everyday life in Mexico with a profound, respectful, and evocative perspective."

It just so happens that on June 19, the Casa de México in Madrid will inaugurate the exhibition When the Light Speaks with some of his most representative images, which are part of PhotoEspaña 2025. And a few days ago, his work could also be seen at the 12th Lanzarote Art Biennial with photographs taken on the island itself.

With a passion for black and white , Iturbide was on her way to becoming a film director, but she found herself drawn to still photography thanks to photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who had a notable influence on her in the early 1970s. She put aside her moving camera and kept her stills to develop a body of work that would heavily feature rituals, death, popular religiosity, and the life of indigenous communities such as the Seris in Sonora—a group of nomadic fishermen who live in the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico near the border with Arizona—or the Zapotecs in Juchitán, Oaxaca. The role of women in Mexican society has also been very important to her.

Her most famous series, Juchitán de las Mujeres (Juchitán of the Women ), portrays the strength and matriarchal role of the Zapotec women of Oaxaca. It was created between 1979 and 1989. Two other important works of hers are Mujer Ángel (Angel Woman , 1979), an iconic image of a woman walking through the Sonoran Desert with a boom box, and Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas , 1979), a portrait of a Zapotec woman with iguanas on her head, a symbol of feminine power.

Influenced by Mexican surrealism— Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington —folk art, and local religious beliefs, her photographs often feature symbols of death, fertility, ritual, animality, and metamorphosis. There is an ambiguity between documentary and dreamlike. Although she works with real subjects, she creates scenes that seem straight out of a dream or a myth. She frequently includes animals, mirrors, masks, altars, cemeteries, and elements that connect with the magical.

By the 1980s, her photographs began to be exhibited in museums such as the Pompidou (1982). Between 1980 and 2000, she was invited to work in Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France, and the United States, where she produced a significant body of work. Over the years, her work has been seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1997), the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2007), the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid (2009), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2009), and the Barbican Art Gallery in London (2012), among others.

She has also received numerous awards and is considered one of the most important photographers in her country.