Graciela Iturbide, Roma, 2007

Graciela Iturbide photographed Rome in 2006 when Marco Delogu commissioned her this work for the annual edition of FotoGrafia – Festival Internazionale di Roma; before this work, the Mexican photographer had previously visited the capital three other times. Graciela Iturbide prefers the intimate Rome to the monumental one. At first she wanders around alone, walking for hours, then she takes her motorbike to discover working-class neighbourhoods like Garbatella, which she is fascinated by, and continues by car in the direction of the Ostia beach.

“Rome is a city that has been photographed in all sorts of ways: I did not want to be conditioned by the work of the other photographers who preceded me, so I preferred not seeing them. At the beginning, I did not have a precise idea of the project, I knew for sure that I would not photograph the ruins, because Koudelka, whom I consider one of the greatest contemporary photographers, had already done so, nor the tourists that Martin Parr had worked on,’ Iturbide explains. “So all I did was take a lot of photographs around the city, including many portraits. The material was very heterogeneous, and then it was the city itself that made me think of the direction to take for this work. Everything came together a bit randomly, as is my photography.”

The photographer keeps her distance from the language of other photographers but is inspired by the writers and poets, she quotes Leopardi, Moravia and above all Pier Paolo Pasolini.