She is Mexico’s most internationally renowned, contemporary photographer: this year, Graciela Iturbide has been granted the Leica Hall of Fame Award for her life’s work. The award ceremony was part of this year’s Celebration of Photography, which took place on 8 October 2026 at Leica World in Wetzlar. The accompanying exhibition, featuring over 50 photographs, will be on display at the Leica Gallery in Wetzlar until January 2027. Iturbide’s “Na’ Lupe Pan” motif from the Juchitán series – photographed in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1986 – was chosen as Leica Picture of the Year 2026.

The exhibition offers deep insight into the artist’s life’s work, which is primarily dedicated to Latin American cultural history. Exploring universal themes such as life and death, rituals and everyday experiences, Iturbide’s imagery is characterised by its moving poetry and magic. The photographer highlights the tensions between culture and nature, tradition and modernity, identity and representation, ensuring that the images retain an enigmatic ambiguity. Deeply rooted in Mexican indigenous culture, and blending surreal elements with religion and mysticism, Iturbide has, over many decades, developed an inimitable visual language – predominantly in black and white. Birds and masks appear time and again as symbolic companions. The photographer’s best-known work, the striking “Nuestra Señora de las iguanas” (Our Lady of the Iguanas), was taken in 1979 at a market in Juchitán. It is a mysterious portrait of a market woman wearing a crown of live iguanas: a Mexican Hydra, but also, in the Christian interpretation, a female Christ wearing an animalistic crown of thorns.

Iturbide’s photographic work follows a humanist tradition which has incorporated psychological and spiritual elements, expanding documentary imagery into an extraordinarily multi-layered form of subjective photography. In addition to still lifes and landscape motifs, it is her social reportage on the living conditions of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the significance of matriarchal social structures that has caused a stir and established her as one of Latin America’s most important photographic voices.

The exhibition put together to complement the Leica Hall of Fame Award comprises over 50 photographs from five series: Juchitán, with pictures from the Mexican city in the state of Oaxaca (1979–1988), México Clásicas (1974–2008), Pájaros (Birds, 1987–1998), Desierto de Sonora (Sonara Desert, 1979), and Viajes (Journeys), which was photographed in Ecuador, Panama, Argentina and Cuba (1972–1994).

Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City on 16 May 1942. As a child, she was already fascinated by photography: her father was a passionate amateur photographer. She married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz (1936–1996) when she was 19 and became the mother of three children. In 1969 she began to study Film at the Colegio Nacional de México, the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC). In 1970 she spent a year as an assistant to photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whom she accompanied on numerous trips, discovering rural Mexico and the diversity of its indigenous communities. A personal stroke of fate, the death of her six-year-old daughter Cláudia, changed Iturbide’s life radically, and she chose to become a professional photographer. By 1975 she had her first exhibition in Mexico City, and her first one in New York City in 1976. From the 1980s onwards, she began to receive international recognition. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Award (1987), the Hugo Erfurth Award (1989), the Prix des Rencontres internationales de la photographie d’Arles (1991), the Hasselblad Award (2008), the Gold Medal from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL) in Mexico City (2024) and the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts (2025). Iturbide lives in Mexico City.