Manuel Álvarez 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.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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)

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Born	February 4, 1902(1902-02-04) Mexico City
Died	October 19, 2002 (aged 100)
Nationality	Mexican
Field	photography
Training	Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes
Works	Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated)

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican photographer^[1].

Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He came from a family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera. His grandfather was a photographer and his father was a patron of photography, painting and literary composition.

Manuel began studying painting and music at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1918. He received his first photographic camera in 1923, and in 1925 began his essays on aesthetics and the technical work of photography, but did not begin professional photography until 1925. Though he was never formally a member of the surrealist movement, his work displays many characteristics of surrealism^{[citation needed]}, and he was exposed to many of its founders. His work often suggests dreams or fantasies, and he frequently photographed inanimate objects in ways that gave them humanistic qualities.

His work bears some similarity to the work of Clarence John Laughlin, an American photographer who was working in New Orleans at around the same time.^{[citation needed]} They both loved literature, and made references to the mythologies of their time visually and in the titles of their images. They both used old-fashioned cameras which were slower than the Leica which were becoming popular among other art photographers of the day. They also both knew Edward Weston, so it is possible that they influenced each other's work.

Álvarez Bravo's work was often political^{[citation needed]}, referencing the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution both directly and indirectly. One of his most famous photographs^{[citation needed]}, Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated) depicts the face of a bloodied corpse lying in the sun is housed at The Wittliff Collections, (i believe this photograph is owned by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) which houses the largest archive of modern and contemporary Mexican photography in the United States www.thewiffliffcollections@txstate.edu. He associated with many revolutionary artists and writers, but did not let politics overwhelm the personal aspects of his work; he continued to create beautiful, dreamlike, photographs of life in Mexico until his death in 2002.

He is considered^[who?] a profoundly influential figure in contemporary Mexican and Latin American Photography, and his work is widely published around the world.

Personal life

Alvarez Bravo married Doris Heyden who became a prominent scholar of Mexico’s ancient cultures. Together they had a son and daughter. He was also was married to Mexican photographer, Lola Alvarez Bravo very well-known in her own right. In his last decades, he was married to Mme. Colette Alvarez Bravo, a French photographer also revered in her own right.

References

1. ^ Manuel Álvarez-Bravo (1902-2002, MX)

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