Inner Light: Photographs by Flor Garduño

“The visions in ‘Inner Light’ have always been with [Garduño] in embryonic form—the project is a self-portrait, a fairytale told through bodies and objects.”

— Phyllis Thompson Reid, Aperture

“Garduño evokes ancient myths and indigenous rituals with a surrealist touch. She celebrates all her subjects….with the sensuous play of light and shadow, but it is the female body, its planes and curves, that Garduño consecrates with sumptuous luminosity.”

— Publishers Weekly, September 1, 2002

Enigmatic black-and-white photography characterizes the work of Flor Garduño, a veteran woman photographer who trained under the Mexican master photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. In her surreal juxtapositions of body and object, human and animal—the supernatural and the tangible—Garduño’s deeply personal work evokes myths, fables, and the dream logic of magic realism, in which the fanciful and inexplicable illuminate the everyday.

Inner Light showcased 62 photographs representing still-life objects, nudes, and elements of the natural world. Garduño’s visionary work—emotional, psychological explorations of femininity—achieve a dreamlike communion of subject and lens. Inner Light is the apotheosis of her ten-year quest to blend the genres of the nude and the still life (“nature morte”) to create hybrids that she refers to as “natures silencieuses.”

Garduño’s work is in the collections of prominent public institutions, such as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, and her numerous photographic books include Testigos del tiempo (Witnesses of Time), 1992; Bestiarium, 1987; and Magia del juego eterno (Magic of the Eternal Game), 1985.

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