Through the Looking Glass

Dressed in black,with gold dragon earrings dangling from her ears,this Mexican photographer is a lady of few words. The feisty 67-year-old is well-known for recreating the fantasy world of the pre-Hispanic communities,often stripping the females of their softness and exposing the brassy underside of things with an almost ghoulish touch. In the Bombay of 1999,she discovered the cross-dressers who bared their chests for her,while in Calcutta,again in the same year,she found the dying and sick,lying lumpishly on a charpoy,shorn of their shabby domesticity as the analog camera romanticised their faces. In the queer paradise of Mexico,Juchitán,where gays and transvestites live in complete tolerance,she explored the matriarchal society.”I like to have complicity with the people I am photographing,” smiles Iturbide,who says she discovered the camera late,well after becoming a mother of three. It was during her cinematography studies that she picked up photography under the tutelage of the well-known photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and over the years earned the Hasselblad Foundation Photography award. Her works are also included in major museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J Paul Getty Museum.

The exhibition,An Eye for an Eye: Master of Contemporary Mexican Photography,is a joint venture between the governments of India and Mexico and commemorates the centennial of the Mexican Revolution and 60 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Over 40 black and white images of Iturbide are on display at the Instituto Cervantes,on Hanuman Road alongside an equal number of photographs by eminent Indian photographer Raghu Rai. “I was approached by the Mexican embassy in Delhi to show my works here. I had known Raghu for a while and I decided to show a selection of my works alongside his,” said Iturbide,on her fifth visit to India. For this particular exhibition,she visited India in 1998 and 1999.

Iturbide claims she is no surrealist,but her photos have a dream-like quality. A jacket hanging from the creaky branches of a tree in Khajuraho seems an unsettlingly dramatic setting for the temple town,while some of her most celebrated works — the Botanical garden series shot in Oaxaca,a city in Mexico that fill up much of the exhibition space — shock the viewers with their gnarled surfaces. “I enjoy the works of Italian filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini,but there is no conscious attempt to imbibe their qualities,” she says.

Meanwhile,Rai’s Mexico is enigmatic— a couple in their wedding dress observing murals,the picture juxtaposed with an afternoon market scene in the town of Chalma,a pilgrimage site in Mexico. There are politically charged photos as well— like the Dust Storm Created by a VIP Helicopter in Rajasthan in 1975. “Our styles are very different,but they complement each other,” says Rai.

(The exhibition is on till October 31 from 11.30 am to 7.30 pm,Tuesdays to Sundays. Contact 43681900)

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