Throckmorton Fine Art is honored to offer an exhibit of forty-five, black-and-white photographs by one of the world’s most renowned photographers, Flor Garduño. The exhibit takes its name from the title of Garduño’s latest book, which won a prize for best art book in 2024 in Garduño’s native Mexico, the Premio (Prize) A. García Cubas, INAH (National Institute for Anthropology and History). The beautiful book offers images from throughout Garduño’s forty-five-year career as a photographer. This year Garduño received another accolade, perhaps the greatest for a Mexican artist: a lavish show of her work at the iconic Museo de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Spencer Throckmorton, the principal of Throckmorton Fine Art, has known Garduño for forty years and represented her in New York for thirty years. For him, “Garduño is the most imaginative photographer of our time.” Indeed, Garduño’s compositions are magical and enrapturing. While her photographs may be sparse, they are elegant and richly suggestive. Garduño’s, dream-like perspective, gives her photographs a mystical quality. The Mexican critic Francisco Reyes describes her work as “the photography of amazement.” Her photographs always elicit a “second look,” and invariably contemplation.

Garduño was born in Mexico City in 1957. When she was young, though, her family moved outside of the city to a farm with a vast family zoo, which Garduño credits with developing her imagination and her curiosity about myths. She studied visual arts at the San Carlos Academy of the Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, having as a teacher the Hungarian photographer, Kati Horn. In 1979, she began working as an assistant to Latin America’s greatest photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Subsequently, Garduño worked for the Mexican Secretary of Public Education, visiting the most remote rural areas of Mexico to find suitable material for bilingual literacy books. This work was formative, giving Garduño the opportunityto learn about her country and its many Indigenous peoples, and to develop her own style. Garduño has continued to travel, finding sources of inspiration for her photography in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Switzerland, and Poland.

Garduño has published many collections of her photographs, beginning in 1985 with Magic of the Eternal Game. Other notable titles include Witness of Time, Inner Light, and Trilogy. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Garduño’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of prominent museums and libraries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, the Museo del Banco de la República, Bogotá, the Museum of Photography, Antwerp, the Bibliothèque nacional de France (Paris), and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Garduño resides in Mexico City.