Photography from the Classics -

#1 - 01.02.09

Try to guess the author's name till next Thursday (maybe also the decade it was taken), when I'll reveal his/her name .

You may post your guess since now!
I decided to post 3 pics from each photographer to show different views from himself, and to make it easier to guess.

You may choose, also, to make some comments on the pic itself, both in a "woophyan" way as you do in your comments [don't hesitate to criticize a Master, for bad or good;)], or in a more general point of view, if you like. Thanks and enjoy!

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Time for revelation:

All the photographs come from the Mexican Master, Manuel Alvarez Bravo!

1. Obrero en huelga asesinado (Striking Worker Murdered), 1934
2. Morning Notebook, 1939
3. Invented Landscape, 1972

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Now, a small biography I organized from M.A.Bravo:

Manuel Alvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics. – M. Alvarez Bravo

One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits. – M. Alvarez Bravo

A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind. – M. Alvarez Bravo


Manuel Alvarez Bravo, born in 1902, was an adolescent living on the outskirts of Mexico City when the Mexican revolution (1910–1920) reached its zenith. Running over the hills during intervals of peace, he would sometimes find a body lying dead and abandoned, the victim of brutal and often random violence. By the time Alvarez Bravo reached adulthood, nearly one million Mexicans had died due to starvation and fighting between rebel factions struggling for power. But his childhood was not lost to these disturbing realities. The experience of watching a local amateur working beneath the red light of a darkroom lamp remains a powerful memory for Alvarez Bravo from those formative years. It was his introduction to what became his livelihood and passion, the creative art of photography. His images are poetic and transgressive, tranquil and unsettling. Bravo shares a formalism with his fellow modernists (Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz), social concerns with revolutionary peers (Tina Modotti), and a penchant for Surrealist fragmentation and disorientation (André Breton, Luis Buñuel).
The career of Alvarez Bravo, spanning nearly eighty years, has passed through many shifts and evolutions. However, the combination of two primary factors characterizes his work: an early openness to artistic influence from outside Mexico, and a thoroughly Mexican subject matter. In the initial phases of his development, through the 1930s, European and American trends entered Mexico through magazines and the visits of avant-garde photographers like Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the years following the revolution, foreigners came to Mexico in pursuit of political and creative freedom. Artistic life was thriving. The determined effort to establish a unified Mexican cultural identity in conjunction with the emergence of Mexico City as an international center for artistic and intellectual exchange provided the backdrop against which Alvarez Bravo pursued his lifelong vocation. The period following the Mexican Revolution—often called the Mexican Renaissance It was a time of a creative fertility, owing to the happy—though not always tranquil—marriage between a desire for modernization and the search for an identity with Mexican roots, in which archaeology, history and ethnology played an important role, parallel to the arts. Álvarez Bravo embodied both tendencies in the field of visual arts.
A self-taught photographer, his primary subject interests have ranged from the nude form to folk art, particularly burial rituals and decorations. Pioneer of artistic photography in Mexico, he is considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. Both his grandfather (a painter) and his father were amateur photographers. Influenced by his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first. Then, with the discovery of cubism and all the possibilities offered by abstraction, he began to explore modern aesthetics. He had his initiation into documentary photography in 1930: when she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti left him her job at the magazine Mexican Folkways. He also worked for the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Some of Manuel Alvarez Bravo's most famous photographs are of nudes, but the Mexican master is known more generally for Surrealist-tinged images of a wide variety of subjects (themes of sleep, dreams, death, and the erotic).
Although he never considered himself a surrealist, these qualities are demonstrated in the Getty exhibition's 1938 photograph of a woman wrapped in strips of gauze bandages, La buena fama durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping), that Breton commissioned for the cover of a surrealist exhibition catalogue.
In the 1930s and '40s, Alvarez Bravo's work evolved as he experimented with different forms. Like Paris photographer Eugène Atget (1856-1927), Alvarez Bravo became fascinated by city street scenes, signs, vendors, and storefronts. Against the backdrop of Mexico City and the contrasts between the visible reminders of indigenous civilizations and the rapidly changing modern landscape, Alvarez Bravo refined his unique photographic style. Many of his works capture the contradictions between urban life and personal solitude.
His photograph Obrero en huelga asesinado (Striking Worker Murdered) especially blurs the line between high art and documentation. A few pictures reveal a love of form for its own sake, as in a 1988 image of a twisting woman seen from behind. But far more often, Mr. Alvarez Bravo draws his uncanny images from the fertile territory shared by sexual desire and religious obsession.
While he was alive, he held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions. According to several critics, the work of this "poet of the lens" expresses the essence of Mexico. However, the humanist regard reflected in his work, the aesthetic, literary and musical references it contains, likewise endow with a truly universal dimension. Bravo’s images communicate with immediacy across the decades.
He died on October 19, 2002, at the age of one hundred.

Text organized by me, A.Miguel Oliveira, with extracts from Darsie Alexander, Charles Hagen, Micol Hebron, Asociación Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Getty Press Releases

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SOME EXTRA Pics from M.Alvarez Bravo:

#4.
La buena fama durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping)_1938

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#5.
Señor de Papantla (Man from Papantia)_1934

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#6.
Parábola óptica (Optical Parable)_1931

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#7.
Peluquero (Barber)_1924

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Now, next "post", please have a look ;)