Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has been awarded Spain’s prestigious Princess of Asturias Arts Award for 2025. The jury unanimously selected Iturbide from 49 candidates across 19 nations, recognizing her innovative approach and extraordinary artistic depth. Born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide has developed a photographic oeuvre over more than five decades that transcends the boundaries of conventional art.
Her distinctive black-and-white photography combines documentary elements with a poetic sense of imagery, capturing everyday life in Mexico with a profound, respectful, and evocative perspective. Iturbide’s lens has captured human nature through photographs rich in symbolism, creating a world that spans from the primitive to the contemporary, from the harshness of social reality to the spontaneous magic of the moment. Each photograph carries an emotional and cultural charge that invites viewers to look beyond what is immediately visible.
Among Iturbide’s most renowned works is her extraordinary 1979 photographic record of the Seri Indians of the Sonoran Desert, a series that exemplifies her ability to document cultures on the verge of disappearing with respect and artistic depth.
Iturbide’s acclaimed photographic artistry
Equally celebrated is her series on Frida Kahlo’s bathroom in Coyoacán, where she captures the intimacy and symbolism of the iconic Mexican painter’s personal space.
Iturbide’s work has been recognized and rewarded around the world in prestigious exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, London’s Barbican Art Gallery, the Hokkaido Museum of Photography in Japan, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These exhibitions have positioned her work in the canon of fine art photography worldwide. The jury praised Iturbide’s “transcendental vision” of landscapes and objects, noting her evolution from portraiture to capturing “the primitive and contemporary” alike.
The awards organization called her oeuvre “essential for understanding Latin American photography.”
Iturbide learned of the award Friday in a predawn call to her Mexico City home. “I’m very happy and very pleased for photography in Mexico,” she told the newspaper El Universal, emphasizing that the win celebrates all of the country’s “incredible” photographers. The Princess of Asturias Arts Award includes 50,000 euros (approximately 962,000 pesos) and a trophy designed by the late Spanish abstract artist Joan Miró.
The award will be presented in October at a ceremony in Oviedo, the capital of the Principality of Asturias in northwest Spain, by Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.
