Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Mexican, 1902-2002
Lucretia (Lucrecia), 1940
geltain silver print
7 7/8 x 7 1/2 in. (i) 10 x 8 in. (s)
SBMAS, Photography Acquisition Fund
2003.17
Photo of Alvarez Bravo in El Campo, Mexico 1970 by Graciela Iturbide
"I was born in Mexico City behind the Cathedral, in the place where the temples of the Mexican gods must have been built." Those words from a personal letter written in 1943 convey a great deal about this photographer’s self-identity; he was never comfortable working outside his homeland.
Asked if he was a magical realist, Alvarez Bravo replied that “magic is a very slippery word.”
COMMENTS
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the eminent Mexican photography, was influenced by the surrealist movement, but his work is rooted in the realities and myths of Mexico, where he lived all his life. Growing up in Mexico City amidst a revolution, he witnessed death on the city streets as well as the renaissance of Mexican culture. Drawn to the contradictions that pervade his culture—the mingling of pre-Columbian myth with contemporary religious rites, for example—Bravo rendered ambiguities with subtlety and wit. On the surface his pictures are compelling; as one delves more deeply into cultural context, his images reveal other meanings and complexity.
Born in 1902, Alvarez Bravo left elementary school to work and help his family. Later he took courses in accounting, literature, music, painting, even homeopathic medicine, before settling on photography. Substantially aided by his friend Tina Modotti, an Italian-born photographer who became a revolutionary activist in Mexico in the 1920s, he never turned back.
His pictures give the impression of being liberated from time and space—eternal Mexico, men and women as they have always been, depicted with presence, dignity, beauty. People radiate their very being. His photographs are “closed worlds”, the images transcending the scenes captured and often seeming to be encapsulated in absolute silence.
Alvarez Bravo was the link between the old and the new worlds. His images are able to synthesize modern international photography and Mexico’s own traditions. He is regarded as the foremost Mexican photographer, but he was unimpressed. “I work for the pleasure of the work,” he said. “Everything else is a matter for the critics.”
Phyllis Crawford, Docent Council, Focus Tour, March 1995
Revelaciones: Manuel Alvarez Bravo
From the brochure for an SBMA exhibition of Bravo’s work organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, in July 1992
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002), Mexico’s most well-known photographer, stated that he grew up in Mexico city in an “. . . atmosphere in which art was breathed.” His father, Manuel Alvarez Garcia, was a writer and painter, and his grandfather, Manuel Alvarez Rivas, was a painter and photographer.
Born on February 4, 2002, Alvarez Bravo’s formal education was interrupted at the age of twelve as a result of the Revolution, and by the time he was fourteen he was employed by the Treasury Department of Mexico City, where he worked in various capacities for fifteen years. During that time, he took evening classes in accounting, painting, music and literature.
In 1924 he purchased his first camera and began to emulate photography masters Hugo Brehme (his tutor and a follower of Guillermo Kahlo, German pictorialist and father of Frida Kahlo), Garduño (especially known for his powerful nude studies) and Eugene Atget, whose work taught him, as Don Manuel put it, “to see and relate to daily life.’ Artist José Guadalupe Posada’s work depicting the holidays, fiestas and rituals of Mexico contains elements that also appear as themes in Alvarez Bravo’s photographic oeuvre. Three years before she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti met the twenty-five year old Manuel Alvarez Bravo and convinced him to send a portfolio of his work to Edward Weston. Weston’s favorable critique was fundamental in Alvarez Bravo’s decision to pursue photography as a lifetime career. When Modotti left Mexico in 1930, she gave her 8x10 view camera to Don Manuel and he replaced her at Mexican Folkways Magazine as a staff photographer.
He began to meet many important artists, including Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera, Camboa, Tamayo, Salt, Kahlo and Villarrutia. His photographs of the muralists’ works were eventually published (in 1966) in the book Painted Walls of Mexico. During the 1930s Alvarez Bravo worked as a cameraman on Sergei Eisenstein’s film Que Viva México, and collaborated with Paul Strand to produce his own film, Tehantepec. His photography was exhibited, along with that of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.
Among the many threads Alvarez Bravo weaves into his work in one of surrealism. He was invited by André Breton to participate in a surrealist exhibition in Mexico City in 1938 and developed an interest in the movement’s aesthetics.
Employed as a photographer and camerman, Alvarez Bravo worked for the Sindicado de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s.
By 1959 Manuel Alvarez Bravo established a foundation for publishing books on Mexican art, and since 1980 dedicated his time to establishing and developing a permanent collection for the first National Museum of Photography in Mexico. He has had numerous one-man exhibits in countries all over the world—France, Russia, Brazil, Cuba, Spain, Israel, and the United States. His work is included in U.S. collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Pasadena Art Museum, California; and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.
The urbane Don Manuel traveled extensively over the years and the content and titles of his photographs reflect a sophistication and richness developed through acquaintance with different cultures’ visual arts, architecture, and literature. He returned to Mexico with a renewed awareness of the diversity, strength and beauty of his own culture
By Jean Ellen Wilder, Education Coordinator, MoPA
Transcribed by Ricki Morse, March 2004
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Born and raised in Mexico City, Manuel Alvarez Bravo came of age during the Mexican Revolution. Having studied painting at the Academia de San Carlos (Academy of San Carlos), his interests soon shifted to photography, which he taught himself. In 1927, he met photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, who encouraged Alvarez Bravo’s vision. He would soon become a core member of Mexico’s modernist circle of artists and intellectuals.
In order to make Lucretia, Alvarez Bravo used a photogram technique wherein objects are placed upon sensitized photographic paper, which is then exposed to light. This process darkens the uncovered areas of the paper and leaves the areas underneath the objects unexposed, thus creating a negative image. Surrealist artists such as Man Ray, whom Alvarez Bravo admired, used the technique most prominently in their automatic or randomized object associations. For this work, the artist used an x-ray of his second wife, Doris Heyden, layered with various objects.
The dagger and the title of the work reference the Roman legend of Lucretia, an ancient Roman woman whose rape by the king’s son and subsequent suicide was said to have brought on the popular uprising that established the Roman Republic. Roman revolutionaries retrieved the dagger from Lucretia’s chest and took an oath to overthrow the tyrant king. The work echoes Alvarez Bravo’s sympathetic stance towards the ideals
of the Mexican Revolution.
- SBMA title card, 2013