Biography The work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) went through many different phases but was always characterised by a thoroughly Mexican subject matter and an awareness of artistic developments elsewhere in the world.
Alvarez Bravo was born in the Mexico City and his first professional work in photography was as a freelancer for Mexican Folkways, a magazine dedicated to the cultural history of Mexico. The vernacular of everyday existence came to shape his photography. He created work in which he transformed the ordinary and seemingly mundane into something extraordinary and monumental, a talent something he shared with Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he shared an exhibition in 1935 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes of Mexico City.
In the thirties, Manuel Alvarez Bravo worked near Diego de Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, whose ideas and aesthetic influenced his style. This period saw the distillation of a new form of photography for Alvarez Bravo in which the mundane became not just formally exciting but also formed the basis for fantasy and allegory. Scenes from daily life inspired Alvarez Bravo throughout his life but he also continued to develop new interests turning his camera towards the Mexican landscape in the 1940s and working as a stills photographer in film in the 1950s.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo is known as one of the great modernists of the twentieth century and is work is in the collections of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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