Manuel Álvarez Bravo
b. 1902, Mexico City, Mexico
d. 2002, Mexico City, Mexico
Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th-century Latin American photography. As a self-taught teenager, Álvarez Bravo’s style developed through the study of foreign and local photography journals, and it was there he first encountered the work of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who came to Mexico in 1923. Modotti became a close colleague and supporter, introducing Álvarez Bravo to the artists of Mexico’s avant-garde, including Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, and Rufino Tamayo, as well as encouraging him to send photographs to Weston.
In the 1930s, Álvarez Bravo met Paul Strand, traveling with him while he worked in Mexico, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. With Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans he exhibited in a three-man show at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, in 1935. Mexico was a cultural hub for many in the international avant-garde in these years; André Breton visited, including Álvarez Bravo in the Exposition of Surrealism he organized in 1940 in Mexico City. Although the artist never identified with Surrealism, it was a major theme in the analysis of his pictures throughout his career. Revealing the influence of his formative years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Álvarez Bravo would instead speak of his interest in representing the cultural heritage, peasant population, and indigenous roots of the Mexican people in the face of rapid modernization.
