In Focus: Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

by Manuel Álvarez Bravo

The career of Manuel Alvarez Bravo (b. 1902) spans many decades and reflects numerous changes in artistic fashion. A self-taught photographer, he purchased his first camera at the age of twenty, and around 1925 he won first prize in a photographic competition in Oaxaca. He returned to his birthplace of Mexico City and in 1927 met Tina Modotti, who introduced him to many Modernists in the city's lively art scene. Among them was Edward Weston, who encouraged Alvarez Bravo to continue his photography. Though his work went unrecognized in mainstream art circles for years, Alvarez Bravo is now considered by many to be one of Mexico's great artists.
The Getty Museum's collection of photographs includes more than ninety by Alvarez Bravo, and approximately fifty are reproduced here with commentary on each image by Roberto Tejada, an independent curator and critic, who also provides an introduction to the book and a chronological overview of the artist's life. The photographs reproduced display the array of styles, themes, and moods that typify art created in Mexico during the 1930s as Modernism first flowered in that country; they also include examples of his work from later decades.
In Focus: Manuel Alvarez Bravo is published to coincide with an exhibition of his photographs at the Getty Museum from November 13, 2001 through February 17, 2002, commemorating the artist's 100th birthday on February 4th. This book also includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Alvarez Bravo's career with participants David Featherstone, independent editor and curator; Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, the photographer's wife and herself a practicing photographer; Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, photographer and independent curator; Charles Merewether, collections curator at the Getty Research Institute; Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, independent scholar; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; Susan Kismaric, curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, and Roberto Tejada.

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 13, 2001

About the author

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the pioneer of artistic photography in Mexico, is considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s.

Álvarez Bravo was born in downtown Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He left school at the age of twelve in order to begin making a contribution to his family’s finances after his father's death. He worked at a textile factory for a time, and later at the National General Treasury.

Both his grandfather (a painter) and his father were amateur photographers. His early discovery of the camera awakened in him an interest that he would continue to cultivate throughout his life. As a self-taught photographer, he would explore many different techniques, as well as graphic art.

Influenced by his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first. Then, with the discovery of cubism and all the possibilities offered by abstraction, he began to explore modern aesthetics. He had his initiation into documentary photography in 1930: when she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti left him her job at the magazine Mexican Folkways. He also worked for the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure from the period following the Mexican Revolution—often called the Mexican Renaissance. It was a time of a creative fertility, owing to the happy—though not always tranquil—marriage between a desire for modernization and the search for an identity with Mexican roots, in which archaeology, history and ethnology played an important role, parallel to the arts. Álvarez Bravo embodied both tendencies in the field of visual arts.

Between 1943 and 1959, he worked in the film industry doing still shots, which inspired him to realize some of his own experiments with cinema.

While he was alive, he held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions. According to several critics, the work of this "poet of the lens" expresses the essence of Mexico. However, the humanist regard reflected in his work, the aesthetic, literary and musical references it contains, likewise endow with a truly universal dimension.

He died on October 19, 2002, at the age of one hundred.