Arguably Latin America’s best-known living photographer, Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) has spent five decades bringing a singular poetic eye to images of her native Mexico and abroad. This exhibition surveys her most iconic photographs, primarily captured in Mexico, but also worldwide, in locations including Italy, India, Panama, and the United States.  For Iturbide, photography is an act of discovery driven by a profound curiosity about different ways of life—even within Mexico itself–and how history, tradition, and ritual shape contemporary experience.

Beginning in the late 1960s while studying filmmaking at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico, Iturbide worked with legendary photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002). Like her mentor, she focused on Mexico’s rich interweaving of cultures but brought to her pictures a personal sense of metaphor and symbolism infused with dreams and mortality. She has deeply immersed herself in Mexico’s Indigenous communities, often highlighting women’s experiences and bringing a more balanced and sensitive portrayal to marginalized groups.

While the early decades of her art mostly centered on Latin American people and customs, since the 1980s she has expanded her travels and focused increasingly on objects and landscapes while creating starker, more abstract compositions. This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to celebrate the global reach of Iturbide’s vision in her long and varied career.

Organized by Fundación MAPFRE, this exhibition features approximately 150 photographs by Iturbide, largely from MAPFRE’s collection with selections from The San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection.