Throughout her career, Mexican photographer Flor Garduo has combined sensual femininity with a touch of impossible. In her nude portraits, photographed in the studio as in nature, the female frame becomes an assembly position between allegory and history, bodily and mystical.
A holds a pear in front of the sea, a bird perched on each of its feet, in Ravens ‘Erbol’. In La Mujer Que Suea (Woman Dreamer, Pinotepa Nacional, Mexico) (1991), an Oaxacan woman stretches to sleep with her arm folded and her head. The composition of the photograph is reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy (1897), the curvy bureaucracy of the two iguanas adjacent to his frame reminiscent of Rousseau’s watchful lion.
“I use the frame to tell stories, to recreate myths and dreams,” he told The Eye of Photography in 2019. “I don’t have any sexual motivation when I take pictures of women. It is the procedure of running together, the open mind of the models, the intimacy that makes them bloom like flowers so that their interiors emerge to the fullest.
For more than 4 decades, Garduo has been photographing, and his paintings are living in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Library of Paris, among others. In 2016, the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts organized a primary retrospective of his paintings.
Born in Mexico in 1957, her years of training on an outdoor hacienda the capital instilled in her love of nature. Although the peak years in which surrealism flourished in his home country, he is a direct descendant of this lineage. In 1938, André Breton’s stay with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera triggered a decade of artistic exchanges between Europe and Mexico City. He studied with Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, exiled to Mexico in 1939 and a vital member of this surrealist medium.
“According to Garduo, his teacher’s greatest influence would be to loosen the reins of his obsessions, erotic fantasies, secret dreams and inhibitions,” wrote essayist and educator Concepción Bados Ciria in “Volatile Bodies: The Photographs of Flor Garduo.” ” Horna, along with the artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, has produced works focused on the traditions of myth, mysticism and occultism.
This influence can be noted in the references to nature and the unsettling spirits that Garduo evokes in the decoration of his studio, through women wrapped in a colossal flora or hidden in the shadows. In La Aparicion, México (The Appearance) (1998), a woman hides through a black shawl poses naked, her pubic region emerging from the layout of a long skirt of white crinoline, her torso delimiting the darkness of light.
Mythology enters Garduo’s scene in the form of the sensual Greek princess Leda, who grabs Zeus’ neck like a black swan; or the bare form of Atlas that bears the weight of a small tree of the world.
He also helped the celebrated 20th-century photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who never officially met the surrealist movement but still imbued his paintings with his ideas. Under his leadership, he perfected his darkroom techniques and told the New York Times in 2016 that “on weekends we take photographs through Array.”
Like Bravo and Horna, as well as its predecessor Graciela Iturbide, Garduo became involved with both the subconscious and the social conscience, exploring the other global as well as his cultural complex.
In the 1980s, Garduo worked with Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky on a commission for the Ministry of Public Education. The duo visited rural spaces in search of topics for bilingual literacy books. Garduo became familiar with the country’s indigenous communities, and they in turn reported their work. In 1983, he took a first formative photograph: Agua, Oaxaca, Mexico, (Agua), of an Oaxacan woman wrapped in a towel, partially submerged in front of a waterfall of steam. Two decades later, she photographed Embrace of Light, Mexico, (The Embrace of Light) (2000), a symbol of a woman holding the giant stems of water lily in front of her body. The portrait recalls Rivera’s social realism paintings depicting local street lily vendors, whose flowers dominate their characters.
“Mexican culture is ancient and rich,” Garduo told The Eye of Photography. “It influences Mexicans in a way that’s hard to measure.”
This wealth has made Mexico a nerve center of photography: the artists it has spawned as Bravo and Iturbide, as well as the foreigners who have been attracted, from Edward Weston and Tina Modotti to Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Two decades before Garduo’s birth, the exiled Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza and Aragon described the magic that would be trusted by the paintings of generations of Mexican and European artists, through paintings and photographs, and which would be exploited through Garduo. “We are in the land of convulsive beauty, the land of edible deception,” he wrote. “[A] position for the mutable, the unsettling, the other dead, in short, a land of dreams, inescapable through the surreal spirit.
Garduo, which marks the boundary between the genuine and the imaginary, the brain and the self, invites viewers to enter, giving the mercurial appearance of life and death in the flesh.