Manuel Alvarez Bravo, NYTimes obit
Hyfler/Rosner
By JONATHAN KANDELL NYTimes
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico's greatest photographer and a world master of
his art, died on Saturday at his home in Mexico City. He was 100.
Along with the painters Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and other
Mexican cultural icons, Mr. Alvarez Bravo was a leader of the artistic
renaissance that flowered after the Revolution of 1910-21. He was also a
friend and peer of foreign avant-garde photographers like Edward Weston,
Tina Modotti and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Mr. Alvarez Bravo's photography combined an eager acceptance of artistic
influences from abroad with a profoundly Mexican subject matter. André
Breton, the leader of Surrealism in France, claimed the Mexican photographer
as an exponent of his movement. In fact, one of Mr. Alvarez Bravo's
best-known works, "The Good Reputation Sleeping" (1939) - a photograph of a
naked young woman bizarrely swathed in bandages and asleep on a sidewalk
with sprigs of cactus strewn about her - was produced at Breton's request
for a Surrealist exhibition in Mexico City.
But Rivera, the muralist and cultural nationalist, could insist with equal
vehemence that Mr. Alvarez Bravo's work was "Mexican by cause, form and
content." His images of shop signs, cafes and street vendors convey the
spirit of Mexico's urban life. His landscapes of agave plants, cornfields,
arid valleys and haunting mountains evoke the varied Mexican countryside.
And his work often exposes the eternal link between Mexico's past and
present. In "Kiln Two" (1957), for example, brick-making ovens shaped like
burning pyramids juxtapose an industrializing country and its shattered
Indian heritage.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on Feb. 4, 1902 - "behind the
cathedral, in the place where the temples of ancient Mexican gods must have
been built," he once said - and he grew up in the midst of revolutionary
violence that claimed a million lives. As an adolescent, he often stumbled
across abandoned corpses, victims of civil war gun battles or famine and
disease.
"The concept of death is explicit or implicit in my photographs," Mr.
Alvarez Bravo said. It is perhaps most famously evident in his "Striking
Worker Murdered" (1934). This photo of a demonstrator moments after he was
fatally shot, the glint in his eye suggesting the duality of life and death,
displays a fascination with the macabre that informs much of Mexican popular
culture and high art.
Although his father was a high school teacher, Mr. Alvarez Bravo abandoned
formal education when he was 13 and took a job as an office boy. He learned
the rudiments of photography from a family friend who gave him a camera
bought at a pawnshop. But he continued to support himself until he was in
his 20's by working as a government clerk.
When he was only 21, he met Hugo Brehme, the noted German photographer, who
had come to Mexico on assignment and stayed. Brehme taught Mr. Alvarez Bravo
advanced European photographic techniques and introduced him to another
German-born photographer resident in Mexico, Wilhelm Kahlo. His daughter,
Frida Kahlo, the famed painter and wife of Diego Rivera, became a friend of
Mr. Alvarez Bravo and sat for one of his finest portraits.
Brehme and Wilhelm Kahlo were the first of a number of talented foreign
photographers who helped advance Mr. Alvarez Bravo's career. In the 1920's
he met Tina Modotti, an Italian-born photographer, and her American lover,
Edward Weston, also a recognized master of the medium. Modotti, who had
strong ties to the Mexican muralists, helped Mr. Alvarez Bravo publish his
first professional work in Mexican Folkways, a magazine that focused on
murals of leading artists as well as popular arts and customs. When Modotti,
a Communist, was deported from Mexico in 1930 for her political activities,
Mr. Alvarez Bravo inherited her camera and her assignments for Mexican
Folkways.
At that time, Mexican artists emerged as the vanguard and political
conscience of a revolution whose radicalism was already waning. Such
muralists as Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros strove to depict the
socialist country that they hoped Mexico would eventually become.
Rivera said, "The painter who does not feel attuned to the aspirations of
the masses - this man may not produce a work of art." Mr. Alvarez Bravo
shared that ideology. Before the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the
Aztecs, he wrote, "all art was of the people, and popular art has never
ceased to exist in Mexico."
His subjects became workers and peasants and Indian life in the provinces.
But Mr. Alvarez Bravo almost always managed to portray them in
unconventional ways and through compelling images. For example, "The
Crouched Ones" (1934) at first seems to be just a photograph of workers
leaning over the counter of a bar, their backs to the camera. But the partly
closed metal shutter of the cafe casts a black shadow over their heads so
that they look decapitated. And chains locking their stools to the bar seem
to entwine around the men's feet, adding to the ghastly impression of a mass
execution.
In another photograph of the same period, "Public Thirst" (1933), a young
boy crouching on a ledge to drink from an outdoor water fountain conjures up
the image of the poor making a first attempt to slake their political
thirst. "Barber" (1924) shows an old, heavyset man, his back turned to the
camera, hunching over a seated youth. Only the title of the photograph
reassures the viewer that the ongoing activity is simply a haircut or a
shave.
The period from the 1920's to the 40's was generally recognized as the apex
of Mr. Alvarez Bravo's career, perhaps because those years coincided with
the high points of other artists who flourished during Mexico's
post-revolutionary cultural renaissance. Mr. Alvarez Bravo continued to be
as prolific as ever, but for a long time he received little public
recognition, even at home.
The photographer Graciela Iturbide recalled that when she signed up for his
course at the Center of Cinematographic Studies of the National Autonomous U
niversity of Mexico in the late 1960's, he was unknown to her and the rest
of the student body. "Nobody wanted to study with Alvarez Bravo," she said,
"because they all wanted to make movies."
In a 1992 interview with The Los Angeles Times, she described Mr. Alvarez
Bravo's method. "We would go out to the countryside to take photographs,"
Ms. Iturbide said. "Many times he would pick a landscape, set up and wait
for something to happen. It was just him thinking and his camera there,
waiting. What impressed me, what I most remember, is that he had time for
everything. He was not in a hurry."
Unlike most professional photographers, Mr. Alvarez Bravo would shoot only a
few frames. "He didn't take many," Ms. Iturbide said. "Only what he wanted.
He didn't repeat four negatives of the same thing."
During the last 40 years of his life, certain earlier tendencies in his
photography became more marked. Whether urban or rural, the Mexico that
emerged in his pictures seemed increasingly silent, slower and depopulated.
Courtyards and streets were empty, or nearly so. Landscapes lay fallow, or
perhaps too arid to plant. People were sometimes visible only by their feet
or hands, or their presence was simply implied by their handicrafts or
meager possessions, like flapping laundry.
Late in his life, when it became hard for Mr. Alvarez Bravo to travel
outside Mexico City, friends and admirers would bring him objects - a
burnt-out fireworks wheel, a shattered piñata - to photograph in the
courtyard of his studio. He also spent much time photographing nudes. It
wasn't the sort of work one could complain about, he joked. "But the
countryside," he said, "the daily life of the street is so much richer than
doing portraits, than doing nudes."
Mr. Alvarez Bravo was married three times. His first wife and childhood
sweetheart was Lola Alvarez Bravo, who became a noted photographer herself,
enjoying a long and varied career in which she worked as a photojournalist,
taught photography and art, organized exhibitions and wrote a Surrealist
screenplay with Frida Kahlo. His second wife was Doris Heyden.
Mr. Alvarez Bravo lived with his third wife, Colette Urbajtel, also a
photographer, just across from his studio on a narrow, winding street of
Coyoacan, a southern district of the capital. Besides his wife, Mr. Alvarez
Bravo is survived by five children: Manuel, Laurencia, Miguel, Aurelia and
Genoveva.
In recent years, he finally achieved the recognition abroad that had eluded
him. There were major exhibitions, including the recent one by the J. Paul
Getty Museum in Los Angeles to honor him on turning 100. That exhibition,
"Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Optical Parables," included more than 100 of his
photographs, spanning eight decades. Weston Naef, the Getty's curator of
photographs, pointed out that Mr. Alvarez Bravo defied the convention of the
globe-trotting photographer who travels widely to find his images.
"For Alvarez Bravo," Mr. Naef said, "almost all of his greatest pictures
were made within 100 miles of his home." He was, Mr. Naef said, "completely
committed to a body of work that had its grounding in the soil from which he
came."
Perhaps the most succinct and memorable interpretation of Mr. Alvarez
Bravo's work came in a poem that Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel laureate,
dedicated to the photographer. It reads in part:
The eye thinks,
the thought sees,
the sight touches,
the words burn.