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Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Getty.

Biography
Iturbide was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1942, to traditional catholic parents and the eldest of thirteen children. She attended Catholic school and was exposed to photography early on in life. Her father took pictures of her and her siblings and she got her first camera when she was 11 years old. When she was a child, her father put all the photographs in a box and she said "it was a great treat to go to the box and look at these photos, these memories."

She married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years; sons, Manuel and Mauricio, and a daughter, Claudia, who died at the age of six in 1970. Manuel is now a composer and sound artist and has even lectured at California College of the Arts. Mauricio took after his father and became an architect.

Photography career
Iturbide turned to photography after the death of her six-year-old daughter, Claudia, in 1970. She studied at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with the intention of becoming a film director. She realized how drawn she was to photography which was Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s area of expertise. He was a teacher at the university as well as a cinematographer, photographer and became her mentor.

In 1979, Iturbide was asked by painter Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca, Mexico. It is traditionally a matriarchal society in which the women are economically, politically, and sexually independent. The women run the market and men are not allowed to enter with the exception of gay men they call muxes in Zapotec language. This experience as a photographer shaped Iturbide's views on life, making her a strong supporter of feminism. Iturbide worked on this series for almost 10 years, ending in 1988. This collection resulted in the book Juchitán de las Mujeres.

Some of the inspiration for her next work came from her support of feminist causes. Her well-known photograph, "Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas" (Our Lady of the Iguanas) came from her photo essay "Juchitán of the Women (1979–86)" which was also shot in Juchitán de Zaragoza. This icon became so popular that there is a statue of this woman made in Juchián as well as murals and graffiti.