The Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, 83, stated in a 2018 interview that “a photograph will never change the world.” This view is reflected in the artistic and anthropological gaze that Iturbide has directed at the forgotten villages of deep Mexico, riven by poverty, and on the faces of the Indigenous people she has dignified. A photograph may not change the world, but the poetic black-and-white images by Iturbide have managed to decolonize the condescending gaze normally aimed at these populations in order to portray life itself, without any qualifiers. It was a silent revolution in Mexican photography that will be honored with the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts in Oviedo, Spain this Friday. “It is society, we, who have to change the world, not the photographs,” Iturbide asserts.