Flor de María Garduño Yanez studied visual arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where her professor, Kati Horna (1912-2000), influenced her profoundly. In 1979, she quit her studies to assist the eminent Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo with printing his portfolios. Following this experience, she dedicated herself to personal photographic work. From 1981 to 1982, she was commissioned to illustrate school textbooks for the Secretariat of Public Education: she visited remote regions of Mexico to document the activities and costumes of the Native Americans, thus refining her understanding of these forgotten cultures, which were to inform her approach. In 1982, a solo exhibition was dedicated to her for the first time at the José Clemente Orozco gallery in Mexico City. In 1985, she published her first book, with the editorial support of Francis Toledo, Magia del juego eterno [Magic of the Eternal Game]. An eponymous exhibition was presented at the Chambre Claire in 1986, during the Mois de la Photo in Paris. In 1988, she undertook a photographic campaign in Latin America, which was the subject of Testigos del tiempo [Witnesses of Time], a collection of rare images of the survival of Native traditions; published in 1992, translated into five languages, this book was an international success and won the Kodak Critics’ Photographic Prize the same year.

An exhibition showing around one hundred images from the book toured worldwide from 1992 to 1999. A regular award winner, the artist is present in numerous institutional collections: the Art Institute of Chicago and the Élysée Museum in Lausanne, among others. Since the 2000s, she has continued in a more formalist vein, focusing on objects, nature, and female nudes in particular. Her black-and-white images, with their pictorial rendering, reveal worlds of tranquillity, sensuality, and poetic immutability, akin to Edward Weston’s photographs.