Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres.

An invitation to the isthmus

Juchitán is a town on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the state of Oaxaca, southern Mexico. It is a centre of Zapotec culture and has long stood for the struggles of Indigenous communities in Mexico.

In 1979 the painter Francisco Toledo, himself from Juchitán, invited Graciela Iturbide to make an exhibition for the town's Casa de la Cultura. She accepted. The trip opened a series she pursued for nearly a decade, from 1979 to 1989.

Iturbide was born in Mexico City. She studied photography with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the master of twentieth century Mexican photography. Through him she became interested in the lives of Indigenous cultures in her own country. Juchitán is where that interest became a long practice.

The women at the centre

In Juchitán, women hold key parts of economic and ceremonial life. They trade at the market, stand at the centre of the fiestas, keep the rhythm of the town. Iturbide put them at the centre. The title says it plainly: Juchitán of the women.

She photographed them at the market, at celebrations, at home, in the street. She did not come and go. She stayed, returned, made friends. She later said Juchitán was one of the places she felt happiest, because of the friendships there, and that some of the people in her pictures still came to visit her years later.

Many pictures grew from that trust. Magnolia was taken in a cantina. The sitter saw Iturbide with her camera and called her over, asking to be photographed. The subject stepped into the frame herself.

Our Lady of the Iguanas

The best known image of the series is Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, taken in 1979. The woman is Zobeida Díaz, who sold iguanas at the Juchitán market. On her head sit live iguanas, arranged in a ring like a crown.

Iturbide has said she took twelve frames of Zobeida and only one worked. It was the only one in which the iguanas all lifted their heads, as if they too were posing.

The title borrows a name reserved for the Virgin. A market seller is set level with a sacred figure. Nothing in the picture was staged. Only a woman, a market day, and a second in which everything happened to fall into place.

The picture later travelled far from the market where it was made. Prints of it are held by SFMOMA in San Francisco, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Brooklyn Museum and others. A moment at the Juchitán market became one of the most recognised images in Mexican photography.

The series was once criticised for not showing an authentic Juchitán. Iturbide replied that this was not Juchitán; it was her Juchitán. The answer is more honest than many documentary works that claim to be objective.

She does not pretend to stand outside. She looks as a guest, a friend, someone from the city. The pictures carry the mark of that position and do not hide it.

What stays with you in Juchitán de las Mujeres is its honesty about point of view. A close relative is Gauri Gill's Acts of Appearance, where a photographer also stays long with a community and lets the people pictured help decide how they appear.