Seris

In 1979, Graciela Iturbide traveled to the Sonoran Desert to photograph the Seri (Comcaac), an Indigenous people whose territory spans the coastal desert of northwestern Mexico along the Sea of Cortez. The work, later published as Los que viven en la arena ("Those Who Live in the Sand"), grew out of Iturbide's early ethnographic commissions through Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, though it exceeded the documentary brief she was given. She photographed daily life among a community whose survival had long depended on the desert and the sea rather than settled agriculture, including hunting, fishing, and the sparse material culture shaped by that landscape.

The resulting images are spare and often stark, matching the terrain itself, and include some of Iturbide's most recognized single photographs, among them a woman crouched in the desert wearing a boombox on her shoulder, a picture that became emblematic of her interest in the collision between Indigenous life and encroaching modernity. As with her later work in Juchitán, the Seri photographs resist ethnographic distance, treating their subjects as individuals within a specific place and history rather than as representatives of a type.