Manuel Alvarez Bravo

(b Mexico City, 4 Feb 1902). Mexican photographer. He studied painting and music at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1918. In 1922, after training as an office worker, he began to take an interest in photography, and in 1923 he met Hugo Brehme shortly before buying his first camera. In 1929, through his friendship with Tina Modotti, he got to know Diego Rivera. In 1930, when Modotti left Mexico, he provided illustrations for Francis Toor's book Mexican Folkways. From 1930 to 1931 he was cameraman for Eisenstein's film Viva Mexico. Subsequently he met Paul Strand and Cartier-Bresson and became friendly with Mexico's leading painters and writers. In 1938 he met Andr? Breton, who was visiting Mexico and who was deeply impressed by the mysterious and suggestive nature of his photographs. Breton was keen to enlist him for the Surrealist cause and published some of his photographs in Minotaure.

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Álvarez Bravo, Manuel (1902-2002). Popularly called ‘the father of Mexican photography’, he began almost by chance. Despite his background as a student of fine art, later experience as an assistant cinematographer with Eisenstein, and mentoring by Hugo Brehme and Tina Modotti, he always declared himself an autodidact. Nonetheless, he lectured in photography at San Carlos University from 1929, three years before he became a photographer. Always preferring to work in his home country, he was little known abroad before the 1970s. Even then, his reputation was as a ‘photographer's photographer’, accessible primarily to an inner circle able to penetrate his vaunted sense of ‘mystery’ and ‘darkness’.

In fact, these characteristics were more to do with subject matter and style than with an innate vision. Álvarez Bravo captured little mystery in his images of everyday life, even including those of the great volcanoes of the Valley of Mexico. And he did not lack international connections: friendship with Modotti; an early spread in the magazine Mexican Folkways; and, in 1938, André Breton's choice of one of his prints for the cover of the Surrealist exhibition catalogue in Paris. By this time he had also met Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and exhibited with them and Walker Evans at Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1935.

Having grown up partly on the streets during the revolution, his fascination with ordinary lives appears throughout his oeuvre. An abundance of images testifies to this: from the boy sweeping with a twig besom, apparently lifted into a balletic pose, to the early shot of a girl on the staircase at his parents' tenement, Daydreaming (1931). Álvarez Bravo's reputation for mystery seems at variance with his naturally lit, unmanipulated, and largely unposed images. (An exception to the latter is the celebrated, Surrealism-inspired Good Reputation Lies Sleeping (1938-9), the portrait of a bandaged dancer.) But Mexico is a land of contrasts: Álvarez Bravo's marketeers sheltering from the heat under a tented rug; or his diners, shaded so that their heads vanish beneath a metal blind at a roadside bar; even his plantation workers, semi-invisible beneath palm fronds—all imply that the hidden is as crucial as the seen. Death is another theme. His Posthumous Portrait, of a mummy in the caves at Guanajuato, complements the images of dead infants dressed as angels sold by every photo shop in Mexico City. His series on the Day of the Dead post-dates the documentary study undertaken in Michoacan by Nacho Lopez (1923-86), and shows images now familiar from tourist brochures.

From the 1970s Álvarez Bravo's work was extensively exhibited in the USA and Europe, and he received numerous honours.

— Amanda Hopkinson

Bibliography

• Kismaric, S., Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1997)

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