IMAGES OF THE SPIRIT.

EYES TO FLY WITH: PORTRAITS, SELF-PORTRAITS, AND OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS

BY GRACIELA ITURBIDE 

AUSTIN, TEXAS: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2006

212 PP./$50.00 (HB)

LAS SOLDADERAS: WOMEN OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 

BY ELENA PONIATOWSKA 

EL PASO, TEXAS: CINCO PUNTOS PRESS, 2006

80 PP./$12.95 (SB)

In November 2006, to honor its revolution, Mexico had its portrait painted by two artists working in very different media: writer Elena Poniatowska, who has written catalog essays for several Mexican photographers including Juan Rulfo and Mariana Yampolsky, and photographer Graciela Iturbide, who is as much influenced by writers as by other photographers. The political differences of these two artists are as intriguing as the aesthetic similarities in their work. This essay will attempt to illustrate what the artist who creates images made out of words has in common with the artist who creates words made out of images as well as how art represents the process of discovering what it means to be Mexican for each artist.

The isthmus of Mexico, with its vast visual wealth, looms large upon our common border. Yet work that foreign photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edward Steichen did in Mexico may be better known in the United States than that of Mexican contemporaries like Iturbide. Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs gathers representative images from each phase of what Iturbide calls a photographic "opportunity of discovering my own country." (1)

"Wherever we go," Iturbide says, "we want to find the theme we carry inside ourselves." She discovered the style of her themes early on; the 1969 photos are visually consistent with the images from 2006. Iturbide began exhibiting her work in 1975, after a fellow Mexican visual artist invited her to the province of Zapotec, previously visited by Frida Kahlo. There, off and on for six years, Iturbide composed images of fat, raunchy, liberated women and drag queens of the pueblo, later collected in Women of Juchitan (1988), featuring a catalog essay by Poniatowska.

With the exception of images like "The Slaughter" (1992), (2) Iturbide's admitted preference for long exposures and nuanced grays lends her work static quality. Some of her photos, commissioned by the National Indigenous Institute, capture the bridal processions, carnivals, and burials of Mixtec Indians; cane workers in Morelos; goat butchers in Oaxaca; campesinos in Puebla; and Seri Indians in the Sonora Desert. Yet, Iturbide does not consider herself a documentarian of Mexican ethnology; rather she insists she represents people as they go about the mythmaking of their day-to-day lives.

Fortunately, certain Latin writers and artists now distance themselves from the term "magic realism." Claimant to the legacy of surrealism, Iturbide confirms that dreams--dreams that trawl the depths of consciousness with baited hooks, that clamor the portent of paths untaken--are crucial to her work. The photographer's mission, she states, is to invest life with light. At times, among the mangled corpses, vultures, and other deeply personal "allegories of death," the poet's eye fails her. But Iturbide's most powerful works--"Lost Dogs" (1998), starkly silhouetted against the landscape, or "Death (Tuxtepec, Puebla, Mexico)" (1979), her haunted vigil recalling the great photo essays of W. Eugene Smith--achieve a visual poetry as genuine as any in photography.

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For Iturbide as for Poniatowska, whose hybrid of straight reporting and imaginative narrative has come to be known as "testimonial literature," the dichotomy between imagination and image is cliche. "A photographer without imagination is," simply, "not a good photographer," writes Iturbide.

Even more striking are the commonsensical remarks of Iturbide in her in-depth interview with Fabienne Bradu included in the book. Every page of Eyes to Fly With reveals an artistic sensibility, leathery tough, like beef jerky. Persevering as an artist, for Iturbide, is about "showing how you connect what you live with what you dream, and what you dream with what you do."

Carlos Monsivais credits Poniatowska with a literary impact unequalled by a Mexican woman writer since Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Like a lover yearning to "feel Mexico inside [herself]," Poniatowska has been a passionate devotee of her adoptive country since the 1950s. (3)

Poniatowska's recent book, Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution, was published by Cinco Puntos Press in conjunction with Ediciones ERA and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History. The catalog essay, accompanied by images from the Agustin Casasola Archive, revisits the soldaderas (female soldiers) of the Mexican Revolution. These remarkable women--part pack mule, part cook, all-purpose concubine--followed and tended camp for peasant soldiers from 1910 until 1917 as the forces of Pancho Villa in the North battled those of Emiliano Zapata in the South.

Poniatowska's text is instructive on several counts. It confirms Virginia Woolf's observation that "the second-rate works of a great writer are generally worth reading ... [if only] because they are apt to offer us the very best criticism of [her] masterpieces." (4) Among Poniatowska's masterpieces is La noche de Tlatelolco (Massacre in Mexico) (1971)--a narrative collage of the 1968 student uprisings--written while Iturbide was still engaged in her apprenticeship to Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

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Given the Casasola Archive's seminal importance as a photojournalistic document of the Mexican Revolution, Poniatowska obviously never intended to gloss over the archival material anymore than Iturbide, who collaborates actively with writers whose texts her images accompany, conceives of her photos as mere illustrations. An equally brief introduction to Poniatowska's body of work, the epistolary novella Dear Diego (1978) makes a far greater impact. The following passage, depicting a female painter's obsession, supports Mexican critic Christopher Dominguez's claim that Poniatowska's writing is among the best prose in Mexico:

    I set myself a schedule ... from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., from 1:30 to
    5, and again from 8 to 10 at night. Nine hours a day of painting
    .... I would eat thinking of how to handle the shadows of the face
    I'd just set aside. I wolfed down dinner remembering the picture on
    the easel .... When it was time to eat, it used to annoy me if
    anybody spoke to me, distracting me from my thoughts, which were
    fixed on the next line that had to be sketched and which I wanted
    continuous and pure and exact .... I was possessed ... and only 20.
    I never felt tired, on the contrary, I would have died had anyone
    forced me to abandon that life. I avoided the theater, I avoided
    strolls, I even avoided the company of other people, because the
    degree of joy they gave me was much less than the pleasure, so
    very intense, of learning my craft. (5)

Artistically, through portraits such as "Carlos Monsivais" (1991), Iturbide has contributed to both Mexican literature and Mexican photography. Both she and Poniatowska admit to being fascinated by the artist-object relationship and by the distancing effect of composition--literary or visual--on how the eye "frames" life. Politically, their portraits of rebellion and independence defy stereotypes of submissively dependent women in Mexican society. The unrepentant voice of protagonist Jesusa Palancares in Here's to You, Jesusa! (Hasta no verte, Jesus mio, 1969), Poniatowska's vividly fictionalized, first-person oral history of Revolutionary-era Mexico, echoes like an audio track over images like "Cholas" (1986), Iturbide's mini-series devoted to Mexican American gangster girls in East Los Angeles. A committed journalist in a country where high illiteracy means many writers compete for the attention of few readers and low demand makes books expensive for vendors to supply, Poniatowska's larger purpose has been to bear witness to the persistent marginalization of disenfranchised Mexicans in general. Iturbide, on the other hand, wants to make useful art but is "not trying to change the world." For both artists, in every way, unsuspected Mexico, a land of sorrow and sunlight, remains "part of an ongoing collective project in which we are [all] involved." (6)

NOTES (1.) All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from Elena Poniatowska's Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2006). (2.) See plate in Eyes to Fly With. See also Image #5670, from Soldaderas. (3.) From www.elenaponiatowska.com. (4.) "A Minor Dostoevsky," The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume II: 1912 1918 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 165. (5.) My translation. (6.) From www.elenaponiatowska.com.

KEVIN BROWN is a literary translator currently working on Mexican poet Efrain Bartolomeo's Ocosingo War Diary.