Redlass's Full Review: Judith Keller - Graciela Iturbide: Juchitan
Juchitan is one of those books that I have struggled with how to expresss exactly why I like it.
I've tried approaching the book the way I do a play that I'm going to review or judge. I go in prepared with information and knowledge, but then I set all of that aside and try to be open to the work that I'm ab out to experience. The critical part of my brain is still working, but I silence it so that I can take in the art and be receptive to whatever it is trying to communicate.
Then, once the work is over, I let it seep into the rest of my brain. I explore my reactions to the work--when did I move forward in my seat? When did I get distracted and fall out of the story? When did I forget where I was? When did I laugh? When did I cry? Then I analyze those reactions and what it was in the work that sparked them.
This is one of the reasons I hate it when someone asks me immediately after a play what I thought of it. I can't tell them yet. I haven't "thought" about it yet, I've only experienced it. The thinking comes after leaving the theater.
So with Graciela Iturbide: Juchitan. I've read the book twice now and spent much more time with each of the photographic plates. I've let it wash over me so I can experience it. I've thought about my reactions and still struggle to explain why it is a good book.
By many people's standards, the book and its subjects might be called peculiar or even ugly--though I'll confess I bristle at the latter. The photos eschew traditional aesthetics of beauty while showing women who are completely comfortable in their own skin, even though our culture scorns their wrinkles, their fat, their crooked teeth, and the complete absence of sexualization.
Graciela Iturbide was a photographer who went to Juchitan in 1979 and spent several years photographing the people who lived there. This book begins with an essay by Judith Keller about Iturbide and her work and then it follows with several plates of her photographs--photographs that were part of an exhibit at the Getty Museum in California. The book was published as a companion to the exhibit.
The photos are all black and white with women being the main subject. The women in this book make me smile. There is something about them which invites admiration and respect. Perhaps it is because the pictures capture them as confident, beautiful, and strong without a hint of glamour. They are women who are REAL and that is the connection that I make with them even though I know of no women in my life who look like them.
Keller's essay talks about how Juchitan is a matriarchal village where the women are wise and strong and firmly in control. They are emancipated in a way that few women were in the 70s. There is nothing in them that suggests a struggle for equality, rather they move with confidence in their strength, never questioning that it should be otherwise.
Some of the imagery is unusual to a Midwestern eye. I find myself constantly turning to the Lady of the Iguanas plate, a photo depicting a woman carrying several iguanas on her head to market. With their mouths sewn shut and lifting up into the air, they transform her into a type of Medusa, though one with dignity and power rather than horror and ugliness. Iturbide took the photo from below the woman and our perspective has us looking up at her regal bearing and unusual crown.
The book is filled with imagery like this. They are images which cannot be categorized simply as "beautiful" or "ugly;" in fact, both of those labels seem entirely irrelevant. Instead, they are a tribute to a village, a culture, and to women.
If I were pressed, I would say that this book is amazing because it has nothing of Hollywood, nothing of New York, and nothing of glamour in it--yet there is strength, dignity, and awe. These are women to be admired. There is a wealth even in what we would categorize as poverty.
It's also a book I wouldn't hesitate to recommend, in part because though there are few words in it, it is a challenging book. It offers the type of challenge that art should, one that asks us to reach inside of ourselves so that we can reach out and connect with others, even those much unlike ourselves.
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