La hija de los danzantes

1933

Gelatin Silver Print

The eye thinks, the thought sees, the sight touches, the words burn. -Octavio Paz, Mexican Nobel Laureate On Manuel Alvarez Bravo................. Manuel Alvarez Bravo is the trailblazer of artistic Latin American Photography in the 20th century and left behind a catalog of images from the 1920's to the 1990's. Through out his career Bravo captured images of rural and urban Mexico through his "Poetic Lens". Taking reality and translating it into dream-like landscapes. A product of the Mexican Revolution, also known as the Mexican Renaissance, Bravo was a key artist who embraced the new and free expressionism that came along with the change of times. He, along with Diego Riviera, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo and poet, Octavio Paz changed the way the world looked at Latin American Art. Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born on February 4, 1902 in Downtown Mexico City. At age twelve his father died and Bravo left school to begin work at a textile factory to help his families finances. During his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first, but then turned to modern aesthetics as he discovered cubism and other new forms of abstraction. Painting was not Bravo's first introduction to the arts, his father and grandfather were both amateur photographers and exposed Manuel to the medium at a young age. In 1930, Bravo was given his first job as a documentary photographer after Tina Modotti left him her position at the magazine "Mexican Folkways" after being deported from Mexico. This began his career as a photographer and with all his influences he would create paths for future artists to follow. Over his lifetime Bravo was shown in over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions world-wide. His work is celebrated to this day and still shown throughout prestigious museums and their collections. He died on October 19, 2002 at the age of one hundred.