After Frida Kahlo died, Diego Rivera placed some of her belongings in one of the bathrooms of La Casa Azul and sealed it. It remained that way for half a century until a specific photographer was given access to document its contents: Graciela Iturbide.
“She could capture it in a kind of way that it was a time capsule,” said Delphine Sims, assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA. “It’s a stark reminder of what it meant for Kahlo to live with chronic illness.” Iturbide’s 2006 project “El baño de Frida” captures everything from her medical equipment to her posters of Stalin in an intimate exposure of the painter.
Iturbide’s dream-like, often hallucinatory oeuvre spans an era as long as that bathroom remained sealed. With the new exhibition, “Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds,“ SFMOMA shares atmospheric and sensuous work by the Mexico City-born photographer.
“She’s really interested in uncanny moments of everyday life, how the fantastical emerges, and the way we can see almost dream-like narratives coalesce,“ Sims said. While the exhibition doesn’t cover her entire career, it includes much of her best and most well-known work.
Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the show opens with “Hay Tiempo,” a section honoring the influence of famed Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whom Iturbide called her maestro. Similar to Kahlo, Iturbide is fascinated by the animals of Juchitán, a project from which emerged one of her best-known photographs: “Our Lady of Iguanas.”
It’s not the first time Iturbide has been a focus at SFMOMA. In 1990, the museum gave the photographer her first solo exhibition in the U.S. when it was still on Van Ness Avenue.
Iturbide doesn’t consider herself surrealist, despite the dream-like compositions.
“She is very clear that her photographs are not surreal, and she references Frida Kahlo’s own critique of being described as surreal,” Sims said. “It’s clear that for her, surrealism is a distinct literary movement and Mexico isn’t surreal — it’s just the way of life there,” Sims said.
As the exhibition title suggests, Iturbide is preoccupied with exploring thresholds: between life and death, representation and abstraction, male and female, celebration and mourning.
Yet one could be forgiven for the temptation to use the surrealist label. Iturbide believed in the prophetic power of dreams; after having had a dream in which a man told her he would “plant birds in the earth,” she believed she manifested the man when she saw him in real life the next day. Birds, in turn, became a central focus of her art, unsurprising since winged creatures are often associated with death — sacred messengers representing the soul or spirit taking flight.
Iturbide often photographed into a trance-like state, as with the image “Mujer ángel,” a photograph she claims not to remember taking. Numerous dualities animate the composition: the modernity of a boom box juxtaposed with traditional garb, the active presence of the woman and the unknown beyond the precipice of a cliff, a figure who is turned away from the viewer yet also revealing herself.
Running through the entire exhibition is the strong presence of animals, whether the tortoise in Kahlo’s bathtub, a hairless dog at a carnival or the many birds. The women-run markets of Juchitán are a natural setting for animals — from roosters to alligators, from crabs to fish — and an entire series is devoted to the slaughtering of goats.
The fascination with death invades her work, whether it’s bloodied chickens to be sold or the burial procession of an infant at the Dolores Hidalgo cemetery. Her preoccupation only intensified after the sudden death of her young daughter, a heartbreak she never recovered from. As her work takes a more conceptual turn, the presentation of death evolves, like with the self-portrait “Eyes to Fly With,” in which she holds up a live bird to one eye and a dead one to the other.
Iturbide practiced a form of immersion photography, becoming enmeshed with the communities she was documenting. She lived with the Seri people of Mexico’s Sonoran Desert for over a month and became so integrated into the community the women asked to paint her face according to their traditional customs. It was an act that led to one of her earliest self-portraits.
“This was a really beautiful moment for her where she felt liked and welcomed into the community,” Sims said. She also lived with the East Los Angeles White Fence Gang, becoming so close with the group she attended their weddings. Traveling the world, she crafted images in India, Madagascar, Panama, Italy, the U.S. and Japan as well as Mexico.
When Iturbide photographed Kahlo’s bathroom, she climbed inside her bathtub and photographed her feet against the end in a direct echo of Kahlo’s famous work, “What the Water Gave Me.” Iturbide doesn’t only photograph: she immerses, both literally and metaphorically.
“Photography is a pretext for knowing,” she has said. Knowing, here, is in the deepest sense. By focusing on the liminal, Iturbide invites us into a privileged interior space, whether Frida Kahlo’s bathroom or the contours of her — and our — own imagination.
“Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds,“ through Nov. 29, 2026.
