Graciela Iturbide sees the archaic world with modern eyes, which means she appreciates its beauty and its psychic energy, but also that she is able to use it for her own purposes. Throckmorton Fine Art is currently exhibiting pictures from “Images of the Spirit,” Ms. Iturbide’s book of photographs of her native Mexico, as well as some from her work in India.There are 32 black-and-white gelatin silver prints, 16 inches by 20 inches, pictures of great beauty, hovering resonance, and ideological purpose.

Ms. Iturbide was born in 1942, married in 1962, had three children, and was deeply shaken by the death of her middle child, Claudia, when the girl was 6 years old. In the late 1960s, Ms. Iturbide studied cinematography at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and in 1970-71 she worked as an assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the dominant figure in Mexican photography. Ms. Iturbide absorbed Bravo’s influences: the tradition of Mexican portraiture, the respect for native, pre-Hispanic culture, and the international modernist impulses of mid-20th-century art and photography. She is very much a Mexican photographer, but also a world photographer.

Ms. Iturbide’s work is iconic. An icon, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, is “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something,” and the word is flavored by its long-term association with certain types of religious portraits thought by believers to be more than merely images. That Ms. Iturbide intends to imbue her work with a similar aura is clear from the title of her book. After all, to produce an image of a spirit requires clairvoyance, which seems more the work of a medium than a photographer. It is remarkable that she succeeds as often as she does.

“Mujer Angel / Angel Woman, Sonora Desert” (1980) is one of Ms. Iturbide’s signature photographs. It is an arresting image, and, like all proper icons, it impresses itself on our memories with its hint of things that are present but unseen. The foreground is a rocky, cactus-strewn elevation overlooking an enormous expanse of flat desert with a mountainous ridge rising far away in the distance. A woman, a Seri Indian wearing traditional clothing, appears to be rushing away from us on the left side of the picture. Her black blouse is held tight to her arms and around her waist with ribbons; her ample white skirt comes to the ground and seems inappropriate for someone making her way through such rugged terrain.

There are three striking features about this woman. One is her long, straight, black hair: It cascades down her back like a mane, and down past her waist like a tail. The second is that she is carrying a portable radio-cassette player in her right hand. And the third is her carriage, her body leaning forward and her arms angled out from her body as if getting ready for flight.

What is this solitary woman doing in this desiccated, monumental landscape? Where are her people, and where is her place? Is she running away from someone or something, or is she hurrying toward someone or something? If the radio is on, what is it playing? Or instead of ordinary AM/FM broadcasts, is it capable of receiving signals from elsewhere?

Another one of Ms. Iturbide’s pic tures that can be said to have achieved iconic status is 1979’s “Nuestra senora de las iguanas” (“Our Lady of the Iguanas”). This is a very troubling image: A bust of a sturdy woman with Mexican features and complexion stands with a mass of iguanas on her head.

The picture was taken with the camera at chest level shooting up toward her face, which gives the figure a heroic cast. At least half a dozen iguanas, many of them quite large, are perched on her head, leaning outward in all directions. Nothing in the woman’s expression acknowledges the presence of the iguanas on her head. The iguanas look prehistoric, and their resemblance to dragons associates them with myth and fabulous tales of adventure.

“Nuestra senora de las iguanas” is part of Ms. Iturbide’s well-known project with the Zapotec Indians in Juchitan, a community notable for its idiosyncratic matriarchal social structure. The photographic technique is quite straightforward – there is no hint, for instance, of digital manipulation – which gives the image a veracity at odds with its surreal content: It is determinedly a picture of a woman with reptiles on her head. Ethnology can certainly help us come to grips with whatever is going on by explaining the background of the festival being celebrated here, and sociology has a lot to say about the dynamics of matriarchy, but we are still left with primitive feelings of revulsion, suppressed risibility, and enchantment at the strangeness of it all.

The fact that Ms. Iturbide titled the picture “Our Lady …” – as if it were the portrait of a saint – is further evidence of her spiritual intentions. Similarly, “Virgin Nina, Ocumichu” (1981) is too laden with portent to simply be an illustration. This is a picture of a young girl in a white festival gown with a cross atop her crown, but her face is in shadows and the ambiguous symbolism of the props that surround her make it clear this picture is not meant for National Geographic. “Pajaros de la muerte, Dolores Hidalgo” (1977) is an enormous flock of birds at twilight, as darkly emblematic as those that conclude John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” or Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

The publication in 1890 of Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion” gave sophisticated Westerners entree into the archaic world of primitive peoples. Many important artists of the 20th century expressed themselves with the myths, symbols, rituals, and icons Frazer made available to them. Graciela Iturbide, born into a comfortable, upper-middle-class home in Mexico City, ventured into the countryside, to places where currents of modernity are just beginning to lap against age-old ways, and preserved what was there by creating something new.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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