Asor.

Asor. Photographs by Graciela Iturbide. Steidl, 2008. 200 pp., 115 tritone illustrations., 8¼x8¼". Special edition available from Steidl.

Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide examines everyday life, her photographs almost always in black and white. Taking her inspiration from photographers such as Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado and Álvarez Bravo, she became interested in the daily life of Mexico's indigenous people and their cultures. She has photographed in Mexico City, Juchitán, Oaxaca and on the Mexican/American border.

In 'Asor' however "the human subject is the reader alone, dream borne, on a journey in which all places remain nameless, time cannot be ascertained and the course is lost to the imagination.

Loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Iturbide constructs her intimate and contemporary extension of Lewis Carroll's classic tale without words, making equal use of the narrative and compositional elements of Iturbide's photographs to startle her readers with visual riddles and quick shifts of perspective.

To accompany a reader along this unlikely journey are six electroacoustic works by composer Manuel Rocha Iturbide. These works, composed over a 15-year period from 1990 to 2005 from sources taped by Rocha Iturbide during his extensive travels, were selected by the composer in response to his mother's photographs.

With secrets drawn from her archive, Graciela Iturbide creates a curious world in which the human subjects we encounter in her widely-known portraits are absent."


I have previously also featured her book Graciela Iturbide.


Apologies for a few days of no posts. I have the most horrendous cold/flu and have also managed to do my back in.