Manuel Alvarez Bravo

photographer

Arguably Latin America’s most famous photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo is the cornerstone of the medium in Mexico. When he began photographing in the 1920s and 1930s, artists who form a veritable who’s who of the lens, like Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, immediately recognised his innate ability. The respect he inspired was summed up in Cartier-Bresson’s response when someone compared Alvarez Bravo’s images to Weston’s: ”Don’t compare them, Manuel is the real artist.”
Such was Alvarez Bravo’s unique eye that the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, sought him out in 1938 to commission an image for the cover of a Surrealist exhibition catalogue. Despite his recognition by such luminaries, Alvarez Bravo had little visibility in the United States until a modest 1971 exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. Subsequent shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (1978) and San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts (1990) made Alvarez Bravo a much more familiar figure, and his 1997 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ensured his consecration.
When Alvarez Bravo began photographing in the 1920s, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) had sparked a national search for identity, and what to do with Mexico’s inherent exoticism was the burning question for photographers.
Perhaps influenced by his relationship with Weston and Modotti, Alvarez Bravo was the first Mexican photographer to adopt a militantly anti-picturesque stance, and he achieved international recognition for work that reached creative heights from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, a period during which he perfected a sophisticated approach to representing his culture. Conscious of both Mexico’s otherness and the way in which this has led almost naturally to stereotypical imagery, Alvarez Bravo has always swum against the tide of established clichés.
Consider Sed pública (Public Thirst), the 1934 photograph of a boy drinking water from a village well – the image contains all the elements necessary to make it picturesque: a young peasant, dressed in the white clothes typical of his culture, perches on a battered village well to drink the water that flows from it; an adobe wall behind him provides texture. But the light in the picture seems to focus on the foot jutting forward into the frame, a foot too particular, too individual, to ‘stand’ for the Mexican peasantry, to represent its otherworldliness. It is this boy’s foot, not a typical peasant’s foot, and it goes against the expectations of picturesqueness raised by the other elements, ”saving” the image by its very particularity.
A similar tactic can be seen in Señor de Papantla (Man from Papantla, 1934), where an Indian stands with his back to the wall, facing the camera. Here, as with the image of the boy, the objective elements of the photograph seem to make it picturesque: white peasant clothes, bare feet and adobe walls, as well as a sombrero and a bag woven from reeds. But having aroused our anticipation of the exotic, Alvarez Bravo cuts it down to size with an artistry that rejects the superficial. The man refuses to dignify the camera by returning its gaze.
It is often felt that the aesthetic strategy of the subject ‘returning’ the camera’s gaze is the one that most effectively represents people at their most active, as it somewhat negates the camera’s tendency to reduce them to objects. But here Alvarez Bravo gives us another turn of the screw by presenting us with an Indian who, in looking away, seems to say disparagingly: ”Take all the pictures you want, outsider. Who cares what you do?”
Alvarez Bravo’s search for mexicanidad (Mexicanness) led him to reconfigure national symbols. Sand and Pines, for example, is an early image from the 1920s that shows a young Alvarez Bravo strongly influenced not only by Pictorialism but also by the then widespread interest in Japanese art. Infusing international art forms with Mexican significance, Alvarez Bravo forms the background of his ‘bonsai’ with what is essentially a mini-Popocatepetl, one of the volcanoes that dominate the Valley of Mexico. Another example is the 1927 photograph of a rolled up mattress. Here he chose not to use the beautifully textured, folkloric petate, woven from wide reeds, which gave depth to the still lifes created by Modotti and Weston. Instead, Alvarez Bravo photographed a modern mattress, but with the twist that its shaded bands make it look like the familiar Saltillo sarapes. In his recurring images of the maguey cactus, we can see his interest in playing with a ubiquitous symbol of Mexican culture; in one photograph he ”modernises” the maguey by making it appear as if the central flower stem that sprouts from these plants has been transformed into a television antenna.
Alvarez Bravo’s politics are always discussed in relation to his most famous photograph, Striking Worker, Assassinated, Oaxaca, 1934. But while it is certainly true that he rejects official nationalism as completely as he rejects the painterly, this image is problematic: its meaning is determined by the title given to it, which may have been influenced by Alvarez Bravo’s involvement in LEAR (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) in the 1930s. It could be argued, however, that Alvarez Bravo’s politics – and his search for the essence of Mexico – are better found in the way he depicts the everyday activities of humble people than in overt social commentary. His imagery is a modest, almost transparent portrayal of individuals that he seems to have ”found” in their natural habitats rather than ”created” through conspicuous visual rhetoric. Alvarez Bravo’s very restrained aesthetic, which avoids overt expressiveness, is an almost invisible technique for capturing anonymous people in ordinary activities, where they are neither romanticised nor sentimentalised. A perfect example of this is La mamá del bolero y el bolero (The Mother of the Shoeshine Boy and the Shoeshine Boy), an exquisite image from the 1950s in which a mother visits her son to bring him lunch and eats with him while he rests from his shoeshine duties.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo had a decisive influence on Mexican and Latin American photography.
His rejection of the simple, his insistent, ambiguous irony and his redemption of the common people and their daily existence have set a high standard for photographers from his region.