About The Artist

These photographs exemplify Bravo’s photographic and artistic vision, rooted in a modern aesthetic, while remaining acutely aware of cultural heritage in post-revolutionary Mexico. Often aligned with influential photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who were finding rich subject matter in the people, landscape, and politics of the country, Bravo’s images also correspond with the rising status of folk culture in the arts during an era often referred to as the Mexican Renaissance. As the murals Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, with their attention to indigenous and traditional heritage, began to dominate the walls of Mexico’s public buildings, Bravo’s photographs began to do the same in the form of stunning black and white prints.

Bravo’s keen visual instincts developed early on – with a grandfather and father who practiced photography, he was the third generation to consider the artistic and documentary offerings of the camera. Though he began his photographic exploration with an interest in pictorialism, his imagery was quickly informed by his more radical contemporaries. While some of his photographs were equally politically-charged (most famously Striking Worker, Murdered, 1934), Bravo’s eye was essentially limitless in its search for subject matter, embracing nude portraiture, intricate formal studies, street documentary and landscape photography, and even taking Tina Modotti’s former position at Mexican Folkways magazine when she was deported in 1930.  No one angle preferred over another, all of Bravo’s images were imbued with varying degrees of tradition, religion, and surrealism.

Rivera, a friend, collaborator, and subject whose portrait appears in this exhibition, often noted the poetic nature of Bravo’s images, along with their ‘desperate and refined irony.’ The popularity of his photographs, however, was not reserved for his Mexican contemporaries. Andre Breton was especially taken with his images, saw their potential for being considered in the surrealist vein, and was a catalyst in bringing much of his work to Paris in the 1940s. Breton said about Bravo that, ‘He has shown us everything that is poetic in Mexico. Where Manuel Álvarez Bravo has stopped to photograph a light, a sign, a silence…it is not only where Mexico’s heart beats, but also where the artist has been able to feel, with a unique vision, the totally objective value of his emotion.’

As his career grew more prolific, Bravo’s images were included in numerous exhibitions around the world, including, in 1955, Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ at MoMA. He photographed through the 1990s until just before his death in 2002, continuing to invigorate culturally-bound black and white images with the insistence of modernity that gave his work its original, pointed relevance.