The little-known color photography of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, presented in a beautiful cloth binding with a tipped-on cover image Manuel Álvarez Bravo produced around 3,000 images in color over the course of his career, though he has tended to be better known for his black-and-white photography. In Color presents more than 80 of his most significant color photographs, many of them published for the first time. A broad spectrum of subject matter is presented in this volume, including photographs of a piece with his familiar style and themes--Mexican culture, street life and countryside, formal portraits, nudes--as well as his little-known color experiments. These works in color greatly expand our understanding of his scope and abilities. A key figure in 20th-century Latin American photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002) was born in Mexico. Self-taught as a photographer, and influenced by avant-garde photography and (later) the Mexican muralist movement, he developed a very personal style that is now seen as marking the beginning of a true Mexican photography.
"Over 370 tritone photographs, arranged in broadly chronological order, mark Alvarez Bravo's remarkable eighty-year career. Strikingly poetic and richly resonant, the collection includes iconic images as well as over thirty previously unpublished masterpieces. Urban and rural scenes, still lifes, nudes, religious and vernacular subjects, portraits of luminaries including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz: all illustrate the peerless acuity of the photographer's eye. Above all, Alvarez Bravo's work celebrates his beloved Mexico, with its indigenous rituals and age-old customs."--Jacket.
An outstanding exploration of a photographer, educator, and curator whose work both documented and created change in post-Revolutionary Mexico This stunning and lyrical volume highlights the personal work of Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), one of Mexico’s foremost photographers. Álvarez Bravo worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, portraitist, and educator and played a critical role in her country’s cultural renaissance. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, she captured a profoundly transformative moment for the country’s land, architecture, and people. She remains best known for these works and for her portraits of prominent modernists working in Mexico, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Lola Álvarez Bravo delves into a lesser-known body of work, in which attention to pattern, light, and abstraction guides the artist’s depictions of urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants. It also addresses her role in building and securing the legacy of the post-Revolutionary period, her dialogue with modernist photographers, and her place within the broader cultural sphere, offering new insight into the mutual influence she shared with prominent painters, filmmakers, and literary figures of her time.
Converging looks gathers emblematic images of the 20th century, the work of three great masters of photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The book is published in line with the exhibition of the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, which echoes the historic exhibition dedicated to the same photographers at the Julien Levy Gallerry (New York, 1935). The texts propose a critical and historical reading of the photographs, within the scope of their vast universal resonances.
The genre of still life is considered from a wide range of visual perspectives as it spans the history of photography from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo began photographing in 1924, during Mexico's thriving post-revolutionary artistic renaissance. His influences, from indigenous cultures to contemporary European trends, combined through his artistry to form a unique, transcendent vision rooted in the iconography of his country. While his early work embraced Mexico's urban realities, its peasants and workers, and its hauntingly beautiful landscape, Alvarez Bravo's ever-present acknowledgment of the macabre prompted Andre Breton, the leader of Surrealism in France, to claim him as an exponent of the movement. Prolific, uncompromising, and committed to advancing the arts of his country, nevertheless, public recognition eluded Alvarez Bravo, even in Mexico, until the 1970s, when his photographs were exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum in California and at New York's Museum of Modern Art, in 1971. But it was not until 1997 that his work became widely known through a definitive exhibit of 185 photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and the simultaneous publication by Aperture of Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories. Manuel Alvarez Bravo won his first award in 1931, and then decided to pursue photography as a career. He met Andre Breton in 1939, and his work was subsequently included in Surrealist exhibitions in Paris. In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired their first works by Alvarez Bravo; in 1955, his photographs were included in Edward Steichen'sFamily of Man exhibition at MoMa. In 1959 Alvarez Bravo co-founded the Fondo Editorial de la Plastica Mexicana, with the goal of publishing books on Mexican art, which he co-directed until 1980, and from 1980 to 1986, he devoted his time tofounding and developing the collection of the first Mexican Museum of Photography. Alvarez Bravo is the recipient of the Sourasky Art Prize (1974), the National Art Prize (Mexico, 1975), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1975), the Victor and Erna Hasselblad Prize (1984), and the International Center of Photography's Master of Photography Award (1987). "Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories" presents an intimate portrait of Mexico's revered photographer and, with his most beloved images, includes a selection of little-known work chosen with the photographer specifically for this classic monograph.
In the pages of this book are reproduced all of the 503 images that Steichen described as "photographs, made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on daily relationship..."-- Back cover.
