Flor Garduño, photographer, passionate seeker and visionary of creativity and an outstanding representative of the richness and diversity of Mexican photography announces her long-awaited book 45 years in the making.
Paths of Life is a recapitulation of unpublished photographs captured by Flor Garduño during her 45-year career. This book reveals discoveries Flor found in her personal archive, together with recent photographs whose paths surprisingly coincide. It is a unique window into her beginnings, her explorations in different corners of the world, and the experiences that have shaped her artistic perspective. In seven distinct chapters, we become witnesses to the legacy of an era through customs, myths, and archetypes that unite us as human beings. With these extraordinary images, Garduño shares her gift for telling highly empathetic visual stories that have left an indelible mark on photography in Mexico and the world.
Flor Garduño's unique photographic universe is a collection of signs that floods us with vestiges of myths, religions, shamanism, and incantations that still surface in the most disturbing interpretations of our contemporary time. Flor’s images compose narratives with hidden meanings that, at the same time that they attract us with a vague feeling of beauty or of gloom, of mystery and of concealment, they capture us with an urgency to decipher them. Her play of symbols reveals her powerful imagination and inexhaustible inner culture, combined with the discerning view of her aesthetic composition: a veritable broth of material and immaterial culture, gleaned from the seduction and enchantment of her encounter with our most ignored urban mythology. – from the Foreword by Tereza Siza
Garduño has published many collections of her photographs, beginning in 1985 with Magic of the Eternal Game. Other notable titles include Witness of Time, Inner Light, and Trilogy. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the US, Latin America, and Europe and are held in permanent collections of prominent institutions including MOMA, MFAH, Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA in the US, and internationally in Mexico City, Bogotá, Antwerp, Paris, and Cologne.
Recently in 2024, Garduño was awarded both the Medal of Photographic Merit and “Best Book Prize” in her native Mexico by the Ministry of Culture. The award is recognition of her “45 years of experience and gifts to the world, always revealing amazing aspects of inhabiting a world all sky, sea and land.” Another honor for 2024 is the Sor Juana Prize from the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago. And perhaps the greatest tribute for a Mexican artist: Garduño held a lavish show of her work at the iconic Museo de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
About the Artist:
Flor Garduño was born in Mexico City in 1957. When she was young, though, her family moved outside of the city to a farm with a vast family zoo, which Garduño credits with developing her imagination and her curiosity about myths. She studied visual arts at the San Carlos Academy of the Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she concentrated on the search for the structural aspects of form and space. There she had as a teacher the Hungarian photographer, Kati Horna, whose communicative dimension of her photographs had a significant impact on the development of Garduño's aesthetic.
In 1979, she began working as an assistant to Latin America’s greatest photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Subsequently, Garduño worked for the Mexican Secretary of Public Education, visiting the most remote rural areas of Mexico to find suitable material for bilingual literacy books. This work was formative, giving Garduño the opportunity to learn about her country and its many Indigenous peoples, and to develop her own style. Garduño has continued to travel, finding sources of inspiration for her photography in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Switzerland, and Poland.
Spencer Throckmorton, principle of Throckmorton Fine Art, a specialist in Latin American photographic art, has known Garduño for forty years and represented her in New York for thirty years. For him, “Garduño is the most imaginative photographer of our time.” Indeed, Garduño’s compositions are magical and enrapturing. While her photographs may be sparse, they are elegant and richly suggestive. Garduño’s dream-like perspective gives her photographs a mystical quality. The Mexican critic Francisco Reyes describes her work as “the photography of amazement.” Her photographs always elicit a “second look,” and invariably contemplation.
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