Polvo de Plata, 2007

Flor Garduño  

Flor Garduño was born in 1957 in Mexico City. When she was five years old, she and her family moved to a country home in Mexico’s rural interior. This is where she spent her childhood and adolescence, surrounded by nature and animals. When she was 19 years old, she entered the Old San Carlos Academy to study visual arts and also took part in the photography workshop of the Hungarian photographer Kati Hornal. In 1979 she started working as darkroom assistant at Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s workshop, from then on consolidating and reinforcing her vocation in photography.

She worked during 1981 and 1982 for her country’s Secretariat of Public Education. Her position required that she travel around Mexico’s rural areas. As Flor had to visit remote spots and photograph people, her pictures then were used to illustrate school books. She saw so much, recorded so many faces, skins, and situations, that she was captivated by the depth and the dimension of the culture that was facing her lens. All this turned into her source of inspiration to enliven her individual exhibition at the Jose Clemente Orosco Galley of Mexico City and to inaugurate the following year (1983) the exhibition Four from Mexico, at the Mexican Museum of San Francisco.

1990 was the next starting point for the continuous advance of her career. In 1992 she published Witnesses of Time, a book that was translated into five other languages and reedited several times. The pictures were displayed in the most important galleries and museums of Germany, the United States, France, Mexico and Switzerland, where the Federal Office of Culture also granted her the Swiss Art Award. Her next book Mesteños (1994) contained photographs of horses and native americans, which won the prize of the Mexican Council of Culture and the Arts that underpinned her incessant thematic development focused on the essence of the Latin American people.

The artworks of Flor Garduño (married, two children) are part of such important collections as the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Library of Paris, and the Louis Museum of Cologne.