"In November 1997, the internationally recognized Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and writer Roberto Tejada spent three weeks in the deep south of the United States. With Memphis, Tennessee as their point of departure, the ensuing itinerary led them down the roads and highways of the Mississippi Delta, and onto New Orleans and the Cajun Country of Louisiana. The result of that journey is a limited edition of stunning platinum/palladium prints entitled Flatlands. Iturbide has deftly charted her own native Mexico as the real and imaginative map of people and place. As in other sequences she has begun to produce in the United States… this work addresses gaps that exist between the urban and the rural; between human interaction and cultural domains, and how these in turn are written into the surrounding natural environs. She depicts the strangeness and the [sometimes] unsightly drama of the present that can erupt from the most ordinary phenomena.
These haunting depictions of an ostensibly lifeless landscape have a grandeur highest by a gradation and pointlessness at odds with each other in the desolate stretches of rural visuality smoldering in a kingdom of redemption. The journey itself can be read as a response to earlier observers who have used this historically-charged geographical region as a place to capture and construct a sense of regional identity according to their ideas about the United States. Iturbide’s vision is toned with the ambivalence of an inverse anthropological eye for the drama that can erupt from the most mundane phenomena. Her images speak of the velocity and extinction; they depict the alien nature of events in the prison house of our empty signs and overgrown environs."
- Roberto Tejada, March 1999
Portfolio Priced at $80,000