Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Cincinnati Art Museum

How Small the World is: Selected Photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo 
Cincinnati Art Museum
May 18 - October 28, 2002

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents an exhibition of the powerful photographs of Manuel Alvarez Bravo that span his career of nearly 80 years. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the permanent prints, drawings and photographs collection at the Museum. 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo's life and work have coincided with radical changes in the twentieth century; he is the last of a generation of artists with direct ties to the avant-garde movements in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. While growing up in the midst of the Mexican revolution (1910-1920), Manuel Alvarez Bravo witnessed the horror of nearly one million Mexicans' deaths due to starvation and the fighting between rebel factions struggling for power. This experience compelled him to become part of Mexico's national search for identity by capturing with his camera the daily life activities of humble people and focusing on the subtleties of human interaction.

Two primary factors characterize his work: an early openness to artistic influence from outside Mexico and a thoroughly Mexican subject matter. The 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 Manuel Alvarez Bravo pursued his lifelong vocation. His photographs capture the eloquent images of dreams, death and transient life, juxtaposed with the everyday existence of street signs, cafes, shop windows and street vendors.

The photographs Manuel Alvarez Bravo made on the streets of Mexico City in his career were taken with the hand-held Graflex camera, which gave him two very desirable qualities in his pictures: the Graflex is a large-format, single-lens reflex camera which gives the photographer the ability to render surface, texture and detail; it also has a larger negative that provides for more detail in the finished print. This was particularly suited for Alvarez Bravo because his pictures appear to derive from a thoughtful, more deliberate matter of picture making. Through his work, he encouraged a way of looking at the world that emphasized the form of isolated images and artifacts, and his camera was the most essential tool for doing this.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo's images are timeless descriptions of a community that came back to life after a period of devastation. He has had an immeasurable influence on Mexican and Latin American photography. His insistently ambiguous irony and redemption of common folk and their daily subsistence have marked out a path of high standards for photographers from his area.

Born in Mexico City, 1902, Manuel Alvarez Bravo attended a Catholic school from 1908 to 1914, but left in 1915 to work. At this time, he began to educate himself in photography while asking for advice from photography suppliers. The 1923 arrivals of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti to Mexico were crucial to Alvarez Bravo's development, and he bought his first camera in 1924. In 1935 he won his first major award and decided to pursue photography as a full-time career. Alvarez Bravo met Andre Breton in 1939, and his work was included in a Paris Surrealist exhibit.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired their first works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo in 1942, and in 1955 his photographs were included in Edward Steichen's Family of Man. During 1959, Alvarez Bravo became the photographer of important art books for the Gondo Editorial de la Plastica Mexicana, of which he was the founder. Manuel Alvarez Bravo left the Fondo in 1980 to work with the Mexican-based media empire, Televisa, where his collection of photography was exhibited and published in a three-volume set. In 1996, his collection was moved to the newly created Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca City, Mexico. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, hosted a retrospective exhibition, Optical Parables, or Alvarez Bravo's work this past winter.

This exhibition is supported by James M. Marrs M.D.

CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM
953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45202
cincinnatiartmuseum.org