When the 30-year-old nonprofit Hasselblad Foundation honored Graciela Iturbide with its coveted International Award in Photography in 2008, the Mexico City photographer was praised as one of the most important and influential Latin American photographers of the past four decades, the documentary-style photographs of her native country "of the highest visual strength and beauty." See what all the fuss is about when Florida Museum of Photographic Arts opens The Spirits of the Earth, an exhibit of mostly black-and-white images, some on loan from a private Boston collection, others from area museums and from the USF's Graphicstudio, where she completed a photogravure project in 1996. Also on display and presented as part of an exhibit at HCC-Ybor is Just Suppose: The Images of Jerry Uelsmann & Maggie Taylor. Both include surreal works by the Florida-based husband-and-wife image makers — Uelsmann's are black-and-white photomontages rich with detail and created via careful composition and manipulation in the darkroom; Taylor's are vividly colored digital creations, each piece made of 40-60 layers of combined, scanned, composed and colorized materials resulting in images that look like paintings. The Spirits of the Earth, through Nov. 8, and Just Suppose, through Oct. 24 (also through Oct. 24 at HCC-Ybor, Palm Avenue and 15th Street), 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat., 200 N. Tampa St., downtown Tampa, $4 suggested donation, 813-221-2222.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2008.