After two extensive retrospectives dedicated to her work in 1996—Graciela Iturbide: la forma y la memoria [Graciela Iturbide: From and Memory] at the Museum of Contemporary art in Monterrey, and Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the photographer’s work seemed to want to follow new paths. In her photographs of the late 1990s, the human figure is almost completely removed from the landscape, which itself usually appears bare and depicted from a perspective that allows for a temporality that is more contemplative, one in which the feeling of solitude prevails.

In 1999 she organized the exhibition Cuaderno de viaje [Travel Notebook] at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico, which included images taken in the southern United States on a trip with poet Roberto Tejada, and those from a previous trip. These photographs manifest her search through the rural areas, far from the metropolitan imagery often associated with Mexico’s neighboring country. Enormous open spaces appear in which the human footprint is visible, but futile, within the desolate immensity. Compared to her previous work, the extensions, stillness, and silence are surprising. In Paisaje¸ the black and white image accentuates contrasts, and articulates the dualities that envelop the composition: sky and earth, light and shadow. At the center of the photograph a haystack rises up; the materialization of completed work, a past that sits still awaiting its future.