Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican art photographer and a central figure in 20th-century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. Though he studied art at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, he taught himself photography. His active career stretched from the late 1920s into the 1990s, with his most significant work produced between the 1920s and 1950s. He became known for photographing everyday subjects in ironic or Surrealist ways. He avoided the picturesque and deliberately worked against stereotypes. His early photographs showed European influences, but he soon shifted toward the Mexican muralism movement and the broader cultural effort to reshape Mexican identity.

Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on February 4, 1902. His father, a teacher, also painted, made music, and staged plays; his grandfather was a professional portraitist, giving Álvarez Bravo early exposure to photography. He grew up in the historic center of Mexico City, behind the Cathedral, in a former colonial building converted into apartments for middle- and lower-class families. He was eight when the Mexican Revolution began, hearing gunfire and seeing dead bodies, experiences that later shaped his photography. He attended the Patricio Saénz boarding school in Tlalpan from 1908 to 1914, but left at age twelve after his father died. He worked as a clerk at a French textile factory and later at the Mexican Treasury Department. He studied accounting at night before switching to art classes at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1923 he met Hugo Brehme, and in 1924 he bought his first camera, experimenting with it using advice from Brehme and photography magazines. In 1927 he met photographer Tina Modotti, whose work he had admired in magazines like *Forma* and *Mexican Folkways*. She introduced him to intellectuals and artists, including Edward Weston, who encouraged him. He married three times, each wife a photographer. His first wife was Lola Alvarez Bravo, whom he married in 1925 as he began freelancing; he taught her photography. They had a son, Manuel, and separated in 1934. His second wife was Doris Heyden, and his third was French photographer Colette Álvarez Urbajtel. In 1973 he donated his personal collection of photographs and cameras to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. The Mexican government later bought an additional 400 photographs for the Museo de Arte Moderno. He died on October 19, 2002.

His career began in the late 1920s and continued into the 1990s, forming in the post-Revolution decades (1920s–1950s), a period of intense government-sponsored creativity aimed at forging a new Mexican identity blending modernity and indigenous heritage. He was photographing in the late 1920s but became a full-time freelance photographer in 1930, leaving his government job. That year, Tina Modotti was deported for political activities and left him her camera and her job at *Mexican Folkways*, where he began photographing muralists and other painters. Through the 1930s he built his career. In 1933 he met photographer Paul Strand on the set of the film *Redes* and worked with him briefly. In 1938 he met French Surrealist André Breton, who promoted his work in France and exhibited it there. Breton later asked for a photograph for a catalog cover; Álvarez Bravo made *La buena fama durmiendo* (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected for nudity, though it was later widely reproduced. He trained many younger photographers, including Nacho López, Héctor García, and Graciela Iturbide. From 1938 to 1939 he taught at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas (now the National School of Arts, UNAM), and in the late 1960s at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos. From 1943 to 1959 he worked in the Mexican film industry doing stills, which led him to experiment with cinema. In 1949 he collaborated with José Revueltas on the experimental film *Coatlicue*, and in 1957 he made stills for Luis Buñuel’s *Nazarín*. He had over 150 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 200 group shows. His first exhibition was at the Galería Posada in Mexico City in 1932. In 1935 he exhibited with Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with catalog texts by Langston Hughes and Luis Cardoza y Aragón. In 1940 his work appeared in a surrealist exhibition organized by André Breton at Inés Amor’s gallery. Edward Steichen chose three of his pictures for MoMA’s 1955 *The Family of Man* exhibition, which traveled worldwide. He won many awards, mostly after 1970. In 2017, his work was recognized by UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register.