Graciela Iturbide: Pájaros

"If birds are the recurring subject in Graciela Iturbide's most recent exhibition of silver as well as platinum prints, there is at least one other leitmotif which binds the photographs together.  Iturbide's variations on her avian subject matter are of such breadth and ingenuity that thematic cohesion is provided by her distinctive talent; the birds are Graciela's birds and the territory they describe are a microcosm of the topology she has long-since hewn with her distinguishing eye.  The bird images are fluently incorporated into Iturbide's ever-expanding and intricate ideography, providing a sense of continuity with and elaboration on her already rich oeuvre.  The pages are populated with overwhelming throngs, loose confederacies, silhouetted sovereigns.  Roosters vacillate between torpor and panic.  Pigeons and monkeys cohabitate.  Some birds are dead, skinned, or stuffed, some circle at unreachable height, some fill the frame with their corporeality.  They are by turns visceral and ephemeral.  They are subsumed by the metaphors we can't help but dress them in, they are stripped down to icons, or they are so physical and so alien that they allude only to themselves.  Taken together they circumscribe the intersection of parable and candor which Iturbide knows so well. " -James Joyce