Manuel Alvarez Bravo – Mexico’s Biggest Photographer

(Notice: Alvarez Bravo is a two-element surname, the commencing “A” effectively has an acute accent)

b. 1902 Mexico City, Mexico
d. 2002 Mexico Metropolis, Mexico (all-natural results in)

With a career that spanned about seventy many years, Manuel Alvarez Bravo was a images pioneer. He is regarded as the most major agent of 20th-Century Latin American photography and one of the good Mexican artists. His subject matter subject provided people art, nudes, and burial rituals and decorations. His finest-regarded is effective are the gorgeous “Good Status, Sleeping” from 1939, and the disturbing “Putting Employee Assassinated” from 1934.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Mini Bio

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born February 4, 1902 in Mexico Metropolis. He attended Catholic school from 1908 to 1914. In 1915, at 13 yrs old, his father died, and he left faculty to aid aid his family members. He worked in a textile factory, and afterwards at the Finance Ministry. He studied literature and arts at evening faculty.

He met Hugo Brehme, a German photographer 1923. Soon afterwards he purchased his initial digicam, and started to review photography seriously. His father and grandfather ended up equally novice photographers. In 1925, he married Dolores Martinez de Anda, who was to become a respected photographer in her individual appropriate, as Lola Alvarez Bravo. The similar year he received a first prize at a neighborhood pictures competitiveness in Oaxaca. In 1927 he met Tina Modotti, who released him to the thriving arts scene in publish-groundbreaking Mexico Town, and to artists these kinds of as Edward Weston, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco. He obtained essential encouragement from Edward Weston just after sending Weston some of his pics in 1929.

He commenced his occupation as a qualified functioning for the journal Mexican Folkways in 1928. He changed Tina Modotti at the journal when she was forced to go away the country, because of to her pro-communist sights. This occupation allowed him to journey and photograph all above Mexico.

In 1935, Manuel Alvarez Bravo participated in a groundbreaking pictures exhibit with Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York Metropolis. Also in the 1930s, he taught photography at the San Carlos Academy. Concerning 1943 and 1959, he worked as a photographer in the Mexican film business.

For the duration of his life, Manuel Alvarez Bravo participated in 150 specific exhibitions and about 200 collective exhibitions. Soon before his death, in 2002 he attended a celebration of his 100th birthday at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo died on October 19, 2002, of normal results in.

Crucial Exhibitions

1935 – Julien Levy Gallery in New York Town

1971 – Pasadena Art Museum in California and New York Museum of Fashionable Artwork

1978 – Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

1990 – Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA

1997 – New York Museum of Contemporary Art