Musica Y Cine

MANUEL ALVAREZ BRAVO.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was Mexico’s first principle artistic photographer and is the most important figure in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with isartistic peak between the 1920s to the 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements toavoid stereotyping. Over his career he had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970.
Álvaro Bravo’s photography career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. It formed in the decades after the Mexican Revolution (1920s to 1950s) when there wassignificant creative output in the country, much of it sponsored by the government wanting to promote a new Mexican identity based on both modernity and the country’s indigenous past.[1]

Although he has been photographing in the late 1920s, he became a freelance photographer full time in 1930, quitting his government job. That same year, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico for politicalactivities and she left Alvarez Bravo her camera and her job at Mexican Folkways magazine. For this publication, Alvarez Bravo began photographing the work of the Mexican muralists and other painters.[2] During the rest of the 1930s, he established his career. He met photographer Paul Strand in 1933 at the set of Redes, and worked with him briefly.[4][2] In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist AndréBreton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo’s work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity. The photograph would be reproduced many times after that however.[2]

Alvarez Bravo trained most of the nextgeneration of photographers including Nacho López and Héctor García.[8] From 1938 to 1939, he taught photography at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM). In the latter half of the 1960s he taught at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos.[4]

From 1943 to 1959, he worked in the Mexican film industry doing still shots, prompting him toexperiment some with cinema.[1] In 1949, he collaborated with José Revueltas in an experimental film called Coatlicue. In 1957 he worked making stills for the film Nazarín by Luis Buñuel.[4]

His career included over 150 individual exhibitions of his work along with participation in over 200 collective exhibitions.[1] In 1928, a photograph of his is chosen to be exhibited in the First Salón Mexciano dela Fotografía. His first individual exhibition was at the Galería Posada in Mexico City in 1932.[4] In 1935, he exhibited with Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with catalogue texts from Langston Hughes and Luis Cardoza y Aragón. In 1940 his work is part of a surrealist exhibition by André Breton at the gallery belonging to Inés Amor. In 1968, the Palacio de Bellas Artes helda retrospective of four decades of Alvarez Bravo’s work. He exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1971, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1978, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1983 and the National Library in Madrid in 1985. From 1994 to 1995 Evidencias de lo invisible, cien fotografías (Evidence of the Invisible, One Hundred Photographs)...