Graciela Iturbide awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards

The World Photography Organization, within the Sony World Photography Awards 2021, has announced the recipient of the honorary award Outstanding Contribution to Photography that this year falls to the well-known Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide for his “defining contribution to the visual identity of your country“.

This award rewards “to a person or group of people who have had a significant impact on the photographic medium“; in this sense, the organization recognizes Iturbide as the best living photographer in Latin America, author of “a photographic account of Mexico from the late 1970s“with the one who explores”multiple complexities and contradictions of his country, questioning its inequalities and highlighting the tensions between the urban and the rural, the modern and the indigenous“.

For the jury, “their images of daily life and their culture, along with those of rituals and religion […] go beyond direct documentary narratives and aim to offer a poetic vision of their themes, based on the experiences and personal journey of the photographer“.

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For its part, for Iturbide this award “it’s a great incentive to keep working. Everything that I have photographed throughout my life has filled my spirit and has pushed me to repeat the process over and over again. Photography creates for me a feeling of understanding towards what I see, what I live and what I feel and it is a good pretext to know the world and its culture“.

Thanks to this recognition, the Mexican joins a list of illustrious names such as William Eggleston (2013), Mary Ellen Mark (2014) or Martin Parr. 25 photographs of Iturbide (selected by the photographer herself) will be presented in a virtual exhibition that can be visited on the contest website from April 15, when the overall winners of the contests are announced Student, Young, Open Y Professional from the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards.

More information | World Photo Organization

Cover photo | © Graciela Iturbide, Mexico, 2021 Sony World Photography Awards