Mexico's most-focused eye

………..Click Here For Original Article

No major photographer has had a career as long as Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002). More important, few have amassed such a strong body of work.

Two factors contribute to his not being better known. Alvarez Bravo spent his life in Mexico, far from leading museums, galleries, photo agencies - the standard means of building an international reputation. And his work defies simple categorization. If Alvarez Bravo had done fewer things so well, he'd probably be more famous.

 The Robert Lehman Art Center at Brooks School has done an excellent job of giving a sense of how widely he ranged. "Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs" includes nudes, cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, ethnic studies, and much else besides. It runs through June 14. There are 57 photographs in all, 56 by Alvarez Bravo. The other, by Graciela Iturbide, shows him at work in the 1970s. Hands clasped at chin as he stares at his viewfinder, Alvarez Bravo looks as though he's praying to his camera.

Alvarez Bravo came of age amid the cultural efflorescence Mexico enjoyed in the 1920s. There are photographs in the show of Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo's hands. Diego Rivera praised his work. His friends included Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. His "Mattress," of 1927, is as much a study in coiled spirals as Weston's "Half Shell Nautilus" of the same year.

Alvarez Bravo was very much like Henri Cartier-Bresson, nearly his exact contemporary, in being deeply influenced by Surrealism; and it's an influence that stayed with him. One can see it early, in such images as "Box in the Grass" or "Fire Workers" (with their helmets, masks, and suits, the firemen look like creatures from another planet). One can see it later, in the '70s, in the witchy tendrils of "Reed and television" or supplicating fronds of "Window on the Agaves."

This attraction to the surreal is even visible in Alvarez Bravo's early flirtation with abstraction. One of the two "Paper Games," from 1926-27, looks like a maquette for the Sydney Opera House. That's a feat of aesthetic time travel any Surrealist might envy: digging into one's unconscious to predict the architectural future!

Alvarez Bravo and Cartier-Bresson met in Mexico, in 1934, and had their work exhibited together a year later. Yet where Cartier-Bresson moved on to photojournalism and a global career, Alvarez Bravo stayed in Mexico and practiced photography outside the constraints of journalism. Always there was a surpassing interest in form. Notice the round perfection of the wheels in "Bicycles on Sunday" or how elegantly the geometric tiles in the background of "Braids" frame the woman's hair in the foreground.

With that formal interest came a no less pronounced documentary impulse. "In life," Alvarez Bravo said, "everything has social content." Like many Mexican artists and writers between the wars, he celebrated his native culture. That culture could be construed traditionally, as in Day of the Dead ceremonies or a young Indian woman, "Margarita of Bonampak," whose magnificent slab of face could make her a candidate for national madonna. That culture was also modern, though. Alvarez Bravo photographed doctors, athletes, and Mexico City storefronts.

Pictures from the early '30s like "Window With Ship Model" and "Optical Parable" (which turns an optician's shop into a Surrealist dreamscape) recall Berenice Abbott's chronicling of commercial Manhattan a few years later.

The most powerful example here of Alvarez Bravo's descriptive power and awareness of his place in Mexican society is "Striking Worker Assassinated," from 1934. It's political, of course. How could it not be? Yet there's no hint of agitprop. Formally, it's almost classical, recalling Manet's "Dead Toreador" and Goya's "Disasters of War." Yet there's no sense of aestheticization or disengagement from the world. What we see is a small miracle of balancing the moral with the artistic.