Graciela Iturbide quotes:

I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.

If you are a writer and you are in Rome you will have a specific connection to it, then perhaps you will go to Sweden and you will have a different connection and it will be a very different experience.

As an artist you need to move on, you need to try new things.

What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.

A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

I don't pretend to make my photographs speak the truth of what Mexico is all about. But in its villages I can feel the way culture is changing, and it's fascinating to live through it and try to capture it on camera.

When I'm taking pictures I even forget that I have a camera. When I shoot I forget about everything. Light comes, death comes, people go in and out in costume - and it's like a play.

The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves.

I love poetry, be it in music or be it in Andrei Tarkovsky, Francesca Woodman or anyone else, I just love poetry.

I never use a telephoto lens. I need to be close to people. I need their complicity; I need them to be aware that I am there taking their picture. I hate paparazzi.

I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.

In a way my work is documentary. But I am also a photographer who has a distinct style. My photographs are a companion to the reality of the situation.

In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.

My intention, certainly, is to create something which is aesthetic but many things are implicit in the work that I do. For me photography is writing, it is history; it can be aesthetic, it can be many things though it does not have to be art.