Alinka Echeverria: The Pilgrims Of Tepeyac

Photo © Alinka Echeverria-All Rights Reserved

Alinka Echeverria is a Mexican visual artist who was recently named 2011 winner of the HSBC Prize for Photography given by the HSBC Cultural Foundation of France. Her work for this prize showed 300 of the 6 million pilgrims that make their way to the Guadalupe Basilica, near Mexico City, bearing statues of the Virgin.

Her website has two interconnected galleries: the first is the black & white The Pilgrims, of portraits made in the Temple of Tepeyac, La Basilica de la Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico City on the anniversary of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the indigenous Mexican Juan Diego.

The second gallery is of color photographs, titled Road To Tepeyac, and is of backs of 300 Mexican Catholic pilgrims on their journey to the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. The photographs of the pilgrims are cut out from the rest of the scene, leaving us their backs and their religious images and icons.

The hill of Tepeyac is the site where the saint Juan Diego met the Virgin of Guadalupe in December of 1531, and received the iconic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.