Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican art photographer, widely regarded as a central figure in 20th-century Latin American photography. Born and raised in Mexico City, he studied art at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes but taught himself photography. His active career stretched from the late 1920s into the 1990s, with his most productive period falling between the 1920s and 1950s. He became known for photographing everyday subjects in ways that were ironic or surreal. His early work showed European influences, but he soon drew inspiration from the Mexican muralism movement and the broader cultural and political effort to redefine Mexican identity. He avoided the picturesque and worked to prevent stereotypes. Over his lifetime, he held many exhibitions, worked in Mexican cinema, and founded the publishing house Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana. Most of his major awards came after 1970, and in 2017 his work was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register.

Álvarez Bravo was born on February 4, 1902, in Mexico City. His father, a teacher, also painted, made music, and produced plays; his grandfather was a professional portrait maker, giving him early exposure to photography. He grew up in the historic center of Mexico City, behind the Cathedral, in a former colonial building turned 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. From 1908 to 1914 he attended the Patricio Saénz boarding school in Tlalpan, but left at twelve when 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 photographer Hugo Brehme and bought his first camera in 1924, experimenting with it using Brehme’s advice and photography magazines. In 1927 he met 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 to continue.

He married three times, each wife a photographer. His first wife was Lola Alvarez Bravo, whom he married in 1925 as he started freelancing. He taught her photography, but she did not gain his level of fame. 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 purchased an additional 400 photographs for the Museo de Arte Moderno. He died on October 19, 2002.

His career took shape in the decades after the Mexican Revolution, a time of intense creativity often backed by a government promoting a new Mexican identity blending modernity and indigenous heritage. Although he began photographing in the late 1920s, he 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 position at *Mexican Folkways* magazine, where he started photographing muralists and other painters. Through the 1930s he built his reputation. 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 created *La buena fama durmiendo* (The Good Reputation Sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected for nudity, though it was later widely reproduced.

He trained many of the next generation of 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 taking 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*. His career included more than 150 solo exhibitions and participation in over 200 group shows. In 1928 one of his photographs was selected for the First Salón Mexicano de la Fotografía. His first solo 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.