The big picture: a study of childhood

Behind him is, we assume, his schoolwork: rows of Devanagari numerals chalked on the worn blackboard to be copied down and memorised. But far more interesting for the boy in this picture is what’s in front of him: a woman photographer who has travelled all the way from Mexico to capture images of his country, India, and who is now pointing her camera directly at him. Delighted, he raises his toy camera and snaps the woman in return.

Throughout her long and distinguished career, which is still going strong, Graciela Iturbide has returned again and again to children in her work. Born in Mexico City in 1942 to a family of 13 siblings, she married young and had three children in her 20s. Her only daughter, Claudia, died at the age of six, marking Iturbide for the rest of her life. “This imprint is present in her work and evident in her obsession with shadows and death,” writes María Wills Londoño in a new book of Iturbide’s photos of childhood entitled Infancia.

Some of the images in Infancia are deeply unsettling. In one, a toddler sleeps among the remains of dead goats, seemingly oblivious to the stench. In another, a girl in a white dress wears a skull mask at her first communion, gazing at the camera with eerie stillness. In one quietly shocking image, a baby lies in a white wicker casket, its tiny form almost fully concealed by cloths and paper flowers. But not all her photos are so morbid. Iturbide has always said that what guides her work is being surprised when she looks at things – and where better to seek out surprises than the unpredictable domain of children.

In India, where she travelled several times around the turn of the century, visiting Varanasi, Delhi and elsewhere, Iturbide tended to focus less on human subjects and more on symbolic creatures or objects. Birds feature heavily in her work from that time. But in this schoolroom, confronted by a small boy with a toothy grin, she couldn’t resist lifting her camera and – as he gleefully mimicked her action – taking his picture.

Infancia, by Graciela Iturbide, is published by Fundación Magdalena and Editorial RM

Photograph courtesy of Gabriela Iturbide, RM and Fundación Magdalena