Incollect Magazine - Issue 11

Incollect Magazine 73 Flor Garduño Throckmorton Fine Art Throckmorton Fine Art recently presented an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Flor Garduño, a talented, versatile, unusually beguiling creator of witty, contemplative dream-like black and white imagery. The exhibition took its name from the title of Garduño’s latest book (which won a prize for best art book in 2024 in the artist’s native Mexico) and included images from throughout Garduño’s forty-five-year career as a photographer — an impressive achievement for women in a culture dominated by male peers. “Garduño is the most imaginative photographer of our time,” says Spencer Throckmorton, the principal of Throckmorton Fine Art. He has known Garduño for forty years and represented her in New York for thirty years. You can understand his enthusiasm for the artist and her work because her pictures are mesmerizing, such as Corazon / Heart, showing a woman wrapped up inside a giant banana leaf frond from 2007. It is a rich, tonal silver gelatin print. “Garduño’s compositions are magical and enrapturing. While her photographs may be sparse, they are elegant and richly suggestive,” Throckmorton explains. A fabulous, evocative image is Appearance / Aparicion, Mexico, 1980, in which a piece of white cloth seemingly floats on the edge of a row of cacti on a remote hillside. It looks like a ghost, or spirit, is visiting the location and hovering there momentarily under an ominous sky. Mexican critic Francisco Reyes described her work as “the photography of amazement.” Left: Embrace of Light / Abrazo de luz, Mexico, 2000. Gelatin silver print. Right: Horse with Circle / Caballo con circulo, USA, 1993. Gelatin silver print.