PHOTOGRAPHY: US Galleries Honour Manuel Alvarez Bravo

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 1 1997 (IPS) - After nearly a century of establishing himself as one of the world’s most perceptive photographers, Mexico’s Manuel Alvarez Bravo is enjoying a widespread display of his work at top galleries in New York.

To mark his 95th birthday, four different galleries – ranging from the Museum of Modern Art and the prestigious Throckmorton Gallery to smaller venues in downtown Manhattan — will display photographs taken by Akvarez Bravo throughout his career.

The display of Alvarez Bravo’s evocative photography, from documentary shots of murdered striking workers to moody, surrealist visions of nudes, has led some New York reviewers, notably the weekly ‘Village Voice’, to call him the “best photographer of his era.”

As the Modern Art exhibit, on display here until May, makes clear, the era Alvarez Bravo participated in was an extraordinary one, in which Mexico’s post-revolutionary culture inspired avant- garde artists from around the world to come.

Alvarez Bravo himself learned from leftist photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, It was Modotti who helped Alvarez Bravo to win his first job as a photographer for ‘Mexican Folkways’ magazine when she was kicked out of the country in 1930 for her politics. Like Weston, Alvarez Bravo learned to combine the dreamy imagery of modern painting with the discrete reality of photographs to make a new type of art.

Alvarez Bravo showed himself equally at home with Mexican artists who explored the country’s political or spiritual themes, like muralist Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo, and with European surrealists intent on challenging bourgeois culture, like photographers Andre Breton and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He shared with all of them a desire to fuse earthy and dreamlike elements into realistic, but suggestive, work.

The Alvarez Bravo exhibits show him both as an incisive, subtle political commentator and as a dreamy, lyrical thinker. But for Alvarez Bravo, there was no split between realistic, documentary photography and staged, surreal visions.

He once famously commented that his classic 1939 print ‘La buena fama dormiendo’ (‘The good reputation sleeping’) – which shows a nude woman wrapped in bandages and surrounded by cacti – was no more or less posed than his pictures of striking workers.

He was right: One of his photos, in which a young striker lies dead in a pool of blood, is actually quite deliberately framed, so that the dark image of his dying body occupies the bottom left- hand corner of the frame, while the dark hues of the Mexican flag tower above him at the top right-hand corner.

The subtle play of light and shadow, and the intricacy of how the shots are framed, often make Alvarez Bravo’s photos seem boldly colourful — even though most of them are black-and-white silver gelatin prints, and even though the photographer resisted taking colour photos well into the 1970s.

In the 1934 print ‘Los agachados’ (‘The crouched people’), for example, Alvarez Bravo shrounds a portrait of four men drinking at a bar with pitch-black shadows that surround their crouched bodies, decapitating them with darkness. Combined with the prominence of a set of chains linking the barstools on which they are sitting, the men look more like prisoners than companions enjoying a drink.

Other photographs combine naturalism with Alvarez Bravo’s exploration into daily Mexican life and spiritual themes. He has many prints showing average Mexicans sitting, for example, but they are never cliched: a small boy eats a sandwich with his mother but keeps one hand warily on his backpack as if to ward off thieves; a young woman stares at a mirror, but only her dark Indian hair and sharp nose stand out from the shadows that frame her.

Always lurking on the periphery of the photos is the hint of mortality, and the suggestions of death and rebirth. In the 1931 print ‘Escala de escalas’ (‘Ladder of ladders’), Alvarez Bravo seems to focus in the foreground on a series of ascending ladders stacked up against a wall. But, hidden partly in shadow in the background, is another stacked series of “ladders”: a column of coffins which seem to rise up as steps to an unseen point above.

That vision is one which persists in Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s ouvre: a Mexico which is poised between the material world and another world of death, shadows and the promise of redemption.

Tying those two worlds together, as the exhibits on view in New York show, is the artist’s loving eye towards his people and his country, and his appreciation for the small details of human existence.