Graciela Iturbide. The Choices Are Made on the Contact Sheet

A woman climbs down a rocky slope with her back to the camera. Her black hair falls past her waist, her pale skirt billows, and in her right hand she carries a portable radio. Ahead of her the desert runs to the horizon. The photograph puts the full skirt and the machine together and says nothing about it. This is Graciela Iturbide's "Mujer ángel" ("Angel Woman"), Sonoran Desert, 1979, the picture at the top of this page.

"Eyes to Fly With" at C/O Berlin brought together around 250 works from more than five decades, Iturbide's first major retrospective in Berlin. The rooms were arranged by series. That was the right call, because so much of her work is made by going back. She returned to Juchitán in Oaxaca again and again from 1979, to photograph the Zapotec women who run the markets and public life there. "White Fence" starts in East Los Angeles in 1986 and follows Mexican-American Cholo culture for three decades. In the 1970s she photographed the Seri in northern Mexico.

There was more. "La Matanza" ("The Slaughter") records ritual animal slaughter in the Mixteca. "Casa Azul" ("The Blue House") was shot among the things left lying about in Frida Kahlo's house. The pictures from India and Bangladesh are rarely shown. The Berlin Botanical Garden contributed plants from Mexican biotopes.

Vintage prints, contact sheets and colour photographs hung side by side. The contact sheets revealed the most, because they show how much selection goes into a single picture. Next to them even a famous image looks less inevitable. You watch the photographer make up her mind, which the finished prints don't let you do. They show what Iturbide sees, and the contact sheets show how she chooses.

Graciela Iturbide, "Eyes to Fly With". C/O Berlin.