GRACIELA ITURBIDE: - I take photographs very fast.
I follow my intuition and what surprises me.
I never use artificial lights or flash.
I always use my camera, just like this.
Frida kahlo's house has been photographed many times.
It is beautiful to photograph, but I am always trying
To encounter something that has not been seen.
There's going to be an exhibit in Denmark
of Frida's entire life.
I'm going to show some photos that I took in color.
This is the robe which she wore in the hospital,
and there, she kept painting.
This is part blood, part paint.
The director of this museum gave me permission
to photograph Frida's bathroom.
I took the photos in black and white,
which is more my way of expressing myself.
Thousands and thousands of people come to this museum.
She's still a figure of sainthood.
I am not a Frida maniac.
Despite her suffering, she painted,
and this is what I admire.
My photography about pain is very Catholic,
very related to my Catholic education.
This is Frida's bathroom.
This is a self-portrait I took of myself in the tub
after my foot operation.
She has a picture called what the water gives me
that has her feet like this, but with water.
I have done various self-portraits.
This is a self-portrait of me in Trotsky's house.
I am very close friends with Trotsky's great-granddaughter.
When I go there, I get a little bit depressed,
because they left the house with all those bullet holes,
with a lot of political memories.
We were 13 kids.
I'm the oldest.
Very, very Catholic.
I was educated by nuns.
I think that I'm the only one in my family
That isn't Catholic anymore.
Now I'm an atheist.
Mm, let's say agnostic.
My father used to take pictures of us
in black and white when we were kids.
I used to steal the photographs.
And sometimes I got punished,
because I was always opening that drawer
and taking the photographs.
And I made my own albums
so from there on, I liked black-and-white photography.
I wanted to be a writer when I was a child,
but I got married very young.
I got married when I was 19.
I was 26 years old when I started to study cinema,
with kids already.
My entry into film school was fantastic,
because Manuel, Manuel Alvarez Bravo,
was teaching there.
Nobody went to his classes,
because everybody wants to become a film director.
But at the third session, he asked me,
"Do you want to be my assistant?"
"I would love to.
It's my pleasure."
And that is how I got to know this wonderful man.
I always felt Manuel Alvarez Bravo's poetry.
Sometimes he only placed his camera at a landscape he liked
and he waited for something to happen.
And he always said, "There is time.
There is time."
It was a real privilege to have found him,
because he not only taught me about photography;
he taught me about life.
Alvarez Bravo focused on tree trunks
to create abstractions.
When I remember that he shot it, I say, "No.
"The influence is too great.
I better not."
But since I saw that there was a beautiful light...
This is Juchitan.
I went to Juchitan
Because Francisco Toledo, the painter, is from there.
He invited me to do work
and display it in the culture house
So the people could see we weren't just taking
but that we were also giving back.
I was there, more or less, six years.
I would go and come back,
and I was able to immerse myself
and have the cooperation of the people of Juchitan.
This is Toledo's aunt.
In Juchitan, homosexuality is permitted.
It's one of the very few places in Mexico that's very liberal.
Look, here's Magnolia.
I was buying beer with the women,
and Magnolia said, "Ooh, my love, can you photograph me?"
I told her, "Yes, of course."
Here's the moment where she's putting makeup on.
I went to the Juchitan market.
I went there because I knew
that the women would be more accepting of me,
so I sold tomatoes with them.
I saw everything they did.
Then this woman came.
Her name is Sulveda.
12 photos.
Only two iguanas remained alive.
They are sold to people to eat.
And I called this photo Our Lady of Iguanas.
Again, my religiousness comes out.
This work, I did with the Seris.
They are totally different people from the Juchitecas.
With the Seris, everything is very severe,
because they live in the desert.
I lived with them for a time,
not as long as I did in Juchitan.
These works were done more or less at the same time.
I started them in 1979.
I did another book about the slaughter of goats
by indigenous people who, for generations upon generations,
worked for rich Spanish employers.
They were paid very little.
And they always crossed themselves
before killing the goats.
That's why I gave the book the title
In the Name of the Father.
In each work, I find different things.
Here, I found this religious part.
It's like the sacrifice of Abraham.
I really like to photograph intense things.
This is a work that I did with the Cholos.
They are a very marginalized people
that were born in the United States,
and I had the opportunity to live and work with them
for a short while.
I began working with the Cholos in Los Angeles in the '80s.
And from there, I went to tijuana.
All Cholo influence.
I wanted to do an investigation.
But what happened is that I was only there two weeks.
I returned later.
It made me very depressed.
I'm very interested
in how a Mexican goes to the United States,
because for them, this is the American dream,
because here in Mexico, there aren't jobs.
What happens is, they don't know what they're going to find.
I went to do a tour of the southern United States.
It was the first time that I was taking landscape photographs.
I began to enter into the landscape.
I began learning about life
in the United States,
Where there are no people on the streets,
which is different from Mexico.
And now I mostly only photograph landscapes.
I went to India.
The first trip was about people.
Since then, I've gone four more times.
And now I made a book titled There is No One,
because there is no one.
There are only objects.
There are only landscapes.
I've always wanted to photograph the abstract
and now the rebars, the buildings,
things I never imagined photographing.
I just finished a project in L.A. earlier this year.
I was in L.A. for a month and a half.
It is called Criba del Cielo, Sieve of Sky.
It is like a grid, a net where the light passes through
or something that passes through the brain.
It is with the text of Fabienne Bradu,
who is a close friend of mine and a very good writer.
I have always said that for me,
the camera is just a pretext for knowing the world.
I am interested in what my eyes see
and what my heart feels.
Why grids?
It means prison, something like that,
Something that is enclosed.
Maybe I feel like I'm in prison myself.
Maybe I also feel locked up.
Maybe my camera is liberating me from those feelings.
It's what touches me, what moves me.
That is what I photograph.
- Hola, Aami.
Como estas?
- I photograph my grandchildren all the time.
Everybody has a photo album.
- [speaking spanish]
The interesting thing about her work
is that it always reinvents itself.
It's a work that has a huge opportunity to not repeat,
to not generate a style
but, more importantly, to search for or be an example
for what human beings can do with their lives.
- I am a composer, an interdisciplinary artist
thanks to my mother, of course.
Also to my father but mainly–
the rebel part, I got it from my mother.
[all speaking Spanish]
Also, my neuroses, I got it from my mother too.
[laughs]
- I studied architecture
thinking that afterwards
I would be dedicated to making movies,
a master's degree in film,
or that I would start taking photos.
And when I finished my degree,
sure that I would change paths or go to another place,
it was my mother who asked me to design her house.
That's the house that we're in.
The important thing is not the architecture.
it's the investigation one has.
And that, I learned as much from my mother as my father,
via my mother from Alvarez Bravo.
Architecture is a tool.
The important thing is investigation.
- [speaking spanish]
[laughter]
- I have a small exhibition that is up at the Tate Modern.
I never imagined being in the Tate Modern.
It is strange, because photography
has always been the redheaded stepchild
of the artistic disciplines.
And all of a sudden,
to be so close to such important painters,
it's strange.
But I'm very happy.
I think that any photographer is an investigator.
Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life,
to know yourself.
If I were not a photographer, I would be very, very badly off.
I would have a very bad time,
because creativity is needed to keep moving forward.
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