Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Manuel Álvarez Bravo | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | October 19, 2002 Mexico City, Mexico | (aged 100)
Education | Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes |
Known for | Photography |
Notable work | Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated) |
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the [Academy of San Carlos], his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. He had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970. His work was recognized by the UNESCO Memory of the World registry in 2017.[1]
Life
Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on February 4, 1902.[2] His father was a teacher but pursued painting, music, producing several plays and his grandfather was a professional portrait maker.[3] Because of this, Alvarez Bravo had early exposure to the medium.[2] He grew up in the historic center of Mexico City behind the Cathedral, in one of the many former colonial buildings converted into apartments for the city's middle and lower classes.[4] He was eight years old when the Mexican Revolution began. He could hear gunfire and came across dead bodies as a child. This would have an effect on his photography later.[3]
From 1908 to 1914 Alvarez Bravo attended elementary at the Patricio Saénz boarding school in Tlalpan, but he had to leave school at the age of twelve when his father died.[5] He worked as a clerk at a French textile factory for some time, and later at the Mexican Treasury Department. He studied accounting at night for a while but then switched to classes in art at the Academy of San Carlos.[2][3] Alvarez Bravo met Hugo Brehme in 1923 and bought his first camera in 1924.[5][6] He began experimenting with it, with some advice from Brehme and subscriptions to photography magazines.[2][3] In 1927, he met photographer Tina Modotti. Álvarez Bravo had admired Modotti's work in magazines such as Forma and Mexican Folkways even before they met.[7] She introduced him to a number of intellectuals and artists in Mexico City, including photographer Edward Weston, who encouraged him to continue with the craft.[6]
During his lifetime, Alvarez Bravo married three times, with all three wives photographers in their own right.
In 1973 he donated his personal collection of photographs and cameras to the
He died on October 19, 2002.[2]
Career
Álvarez Bravo's photography career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. It formed in the decades after the Mexican Revolution (1920s to 1950s) when there was significant creative output in the country, much of it sponsored by the government wanting to promote a new Mexican identity based on both modernity and the country's indigenous past.[2]
Although he was photographing in the late 1920s, he became a freelance photographer full-time in 1930, quitting his government job. That same year, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico for political activities and she left Alvarez Bravo her camera and her job at Mexican Folkways magazine. For this publication, Alvarez Bravo began photographing the work of the Mexican muralists and other painters.[3] During the rest of the 1930s, he established his career. He met photographer Paul Strand in 1933 on the set of the film "Redes", and worked with him briefly.[3][5] In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist André Breton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo's work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity. The photograph would be reproduced many times after that however.[3]
Alvarez Bravo trained most of the next generation of photographers including
From 1943 to 1959, he worked in the Mexican film industry doing still shots, prompting him to experiment some with cinema.[2] In 1949, he collaborated with José Revueltas in an experimental film called Coatlicue. In 1957 he worked making stills for the film Nazarín by Luis Buñuel.[5]
His career included over 150 individual exhibitions of his work along with participation in over 200 collective exhibitions.
His first publication was in 1945, writing the book “El arte negro.” His photographs appeared in many publications over his career including the book México: pintura de hoy by Luis Cardoza y Aragón in 1964. He co wrote and provided the photographs for the book Instante y revelación along with Octavio Paz in 1982.[5] In 1959 he founded the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana with Leopoldo Méndez, Gabriel Figueroa, Carlos Pellicer and Rafael Carrillo which produces books on Mexican art. He spent most of the 1960s with this project, putting him in relative obscurity until the 1970s when his work was widely exhibited again.[3][5]
Alvarez Bravo's first significant award for his photography was first prize for an image of two lovers on a boat at the Feria Regional Ganadera in
Alvarez Bravo continued to photograph until his death. About a year before his death, when he could no longer travel, he photographed nudes. He stated that “It wasn't the sort of work one can complain about.”[3][10]
Significant collections of his work exist in Mexico and the United States. The
In 2005 Alvarez Bravo was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.[14]
Artistry
He was the pioneer of artistic photography in Mexico and the most important figure in Latin American photography for the 20th century.[2][10] His work reached creative heights from the 1920s through the 1940s.[15] In developing his craft, he recognized the difficulties of the photographic medium, such as the inability to capture the past and the difficulty of avoiding stereotyping.[15]
His primary subjects were nudes, folk art and rituals, especially burials and decorations, shop windows, urban streets and everyday interactions.[3][6] Although he did much of his work in Mexico City, Diego Rivera encouraged him to visit the towns and rural areas.[10] Alvarez Bravo's photographs almost never depict trappings of political power, instead preferring subjects related to everyday life. Most of his subjects are nameless.[16] In addition to his main subjects, he also sought out certain textures, especially the surfaces of walls and floors. One example is “Hair on Tile” featuring a long lock of wavy hair on a tile floor with star and cross designs.[17]
He used large cameras which produced more detail in the finished print. However, he was more concerned with the images he photographed than the technical quality of his prints. The compositions were generally excellent and the images poetic.[3] He gave titles to his photographs in order to distinguish them. The titles of his photographs often are based on Mexican myth and culture.[3]
Alvarez Bravo's early work was influenced by European
Alvarez Bravo's trademark was the ability to capture hidden and surreal essences beneath the apparently ordinary images he was photographing.
Alvarez Bravo used Mexico City's streets and squares to frame statements about the social and cultural realities of the city.[21] He used his lens to present Mexico City not in terms of moral or heroic, but rather of social relationships and material clashes.[22] These included class and gender roles.[21] During the 1930s and 1940s, he discovered increasingly more complex ways to frame the contradictions of Mexico's urban life into social statements. In his pictures, feminine identity has a complex symbolic range where sex overlaps with other social identities of everyday life.[4]
References
- ^ "The archives of negatives, publications and documents of Manuel Álvarez Bravo". www.unesco.org. Archived from the original on 26 November 2017.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Biography". Mexico: Asociación Manuel Álvarez Bravo. 2008. Archived from the original on 22 October 2018. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ ISSN 1028-9089. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ a b Tejada, p. 114
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Chronology". Mexico: Asociación Manuel Álvarez Bravo. 2008. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ a b c "Manuel Alvarez Bravo". Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ Tejada, p. 104
- ^ "Lola Alvarez Bravo Photographs". Tucson: Center for Creative Photography University of Arizona. Archived from the original on 21 October 2012. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ Mraz, p. 7
- ^ a b c d e Boehm, Mike (27 January 2010). "Donors give Getty 52 images by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico's leading photographer". LA Times. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ "Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo". Sistema de Información Cultural (in Spanish). Mexico: CONACULTA. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ Sergio Raul Lopez (25 May 2001). "Tiene en Casa Lamm albergue de altura" [Casa Lamm has a high warehouse]. Reforma (in Spanish). Mexico City. p. 1.
- ^ Luis Carlos Sánchez (25 January 2012). "Manuel Álvarez Bravo, México y Francia lo celebran" [Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico and France celebrate him]. Excelsior (in Spanish). Mexico City. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ "Manuel Álvarez Bravo". International Photography Hall of Fame. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ a b c d Mraz, p. 6
- ^ Tejada, p.113-114
- ^ Tejada, p. 116
- ^ Tejada, p. 96
- ^ Tejada, p. 103
- ^ Tejada, p. 105
- ^ a b Tejada, p. 95
- ^ Tejada, p. 126
Bibliography
- Mraz, John (2003). Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tejada, Roberto (2009). National Camera : Photography and Mexico's Image Environment. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816640485.
External links
- Official website
- UNESCO Memory of the World Register, Manuel Alvarez Bravo
- Master of Photography
- World Wide Arts Resources
- Manuel Álvarez Bravo collection at the Israel Museum. Retrieved September 2016
- Photographs: Manuel Alvarez Bravo's Poetic Eye, video, Getty Museum