Graciela Iturbide: I became Maya’s mentor through a government grant in the 1990s and, not long after, she traveled with me to France and Hungary as an assistant. We have a similar way of thinking, politically and spiritually, and we live in similar worlds, but our temperaments are very different. Maya has often looked for the toughest thing she can find — the femicides in Juárez; her wonderful projects with sex workers — though she has also photographed healers and shamans. I prefer to shoot in calmer situations. When I get surprised by something, that’s when I pull the trigger.
I don’t feel I’m her teacher, although I suppose she learned about photography from our long conversations and from looking at images together, and we have a shared way of working. I go to live with the people I photograph for a month or two [in order to] establish relationships. It makes the work less intrusive. While Maya was working on “Plaza de la Soledad” (2006), her book about prostitutes in Mexico City, she took me to meet those women. She’d developed such close relationships with them, too.
But I don’t know if we have such clear-cut legacies in Mexican photography. When I started out in the 1970s, the great Manuel Álvarez Bravo was the first photographer I knew. As his assistant, I learned how to develop, how to draw out blacks, whites and grays. More than anything, though, in the many years I knew him, he taught me a way of life. He taught me about literature and music and painting, about how to be myself and how to have liberty. My family, who were very conservative, didn’t approve, but now I have nieces who want to be photographers so, in one way or another, I’m passing down the legacy that he left to me, to Maya and others. We all have to go our own way at some point. If we don’t, we never become ourselves.
Maya Goded: For more than 30 years, Graciela and I have had this intense dialogue. I would go over and we would drink a lot of mezcal, look at images, talk about photography, what we were reading, what we were listening to, ideas, politics, the social and cultural life taking place around us. Photography wasn’t just looking at photo books. It was life itself. For a time, Graciela was the only person I always showed my work to, and she’s the only photographer I’ve gone into the field with. She has this powerful but natural way of moving through space, which is something I learned from her: to wait and observe, letting time do its work.
If you’re photographing vulnerable situations, you have to make yourself vulnerable, too. Photography’s a kind of healing, a way to understand your own wounds, which is something Graciela and I have spoken about a lot. Over the years, I’ve seen that she’s always searching. If you have a fixed idea about your work, if you’re not questioning yourself, that means you’re not really living your craft.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
