photo: graciela iturbide
The Instagram Counter-Archive: Guadalupe Rosales, Graciela Iturbide, and Chicana Representation Across Borders
June 2021
Burlington Contemporary
“The afterlife of Iturbide’s East LA photographs aligns well with her perception of the work as an aesthetic fabrication, focused on formal qualities over ethnographic ones. The poetry and emotional reality of her images have enabled the community to claim and shape them as their own, long after Iturbide left town. The failure of the images as ethnographic, then, allows them to be folded into Chicana narratives and to confirm Rosales’s mission of self-representation. The artistic nature of Iturbide’s images grants a status of archivability that extends beyond the photographs’ frames. And the afterlives of the images demonstrate that it is not only representation itself that matters, but also the reclaiming and reframing of those representations made by outsiders.”
June 2021
Burlington Contemporary
“The afterlife of Iturbide’s East LA photographs aligns well with her perception of the work as an aesthetic fabrication, focused on formal qualities over ethnographic ones. The poetry and emotional reality of her images have enabled the community to claim and shape them as their own, long after Iturbide left town. The failure of the images as ethnographic, then, allows them to be folded into Chicana narratives and to confirm Rosales’s mission of self-representation. The artistic nature of Iturbide’s images grants a status of archivability that extends beyond the photographs’ frames. And the afterlives of the images demonstrate that it is not only representation itself that matters, but also the reclaiming and reframing of those representations made by outsiders.”