Mexico City, Mexico
Manuel Bravo attended art lessons at the Academy of San Carlos.
Henri Matisse at home, ca. 1943. Photo by Roger Schall.
Portrait of Manuel Bravo.
Portrait photo of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
The photographer un his later years.
Manuel Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo at work.
Mexico City, Mexico
Manuel Bravo attended art lessons at the Academy of San Carlos.
Henri Matisse at home, ca. 1943. Photo by Roger Schall.
Portrait of Manuel Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Portrait photo of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
The photographer un his later years.
Manuel Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo at work.
Bravo was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on February 4, 1902. His father was a teacher but he was greatly interested in painting, photography and writing as well; he even produced several plays. Bravo's grandfather was a professional portraitist.
Manuel Bravo was raised in the historic centre of Mexico City behind the Cathedral. He lived in one of the many former colonial buildings transformed into apartments for the city's middle and lower classes. Bravo was only eight when the Mexican Revolution started. He could hear gunfire and came across dead bodies as a young boy. This had a significant effect on his photography later.
Between 1908 and 1914 Bravo attended the Patricio Saénz boarding school in Tlalpan, however, he had to leave school at the age of twelve after his father's death. He started to work as a clerk at a French textile factory, and later he joined the staff of the Mexican Treasury Department. He attended evening courses, where he studied accounting for a while and then switched to classes in art at the Academy of San Carlos.
Bravo's career as a photographer spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. He met Hugo Brehme, a German photographer, in 1923 and purchased his first camera in 1924. He was largely self-taught, and other photographers played a major role in his development. Manuel Bravo started to experiment with his camera, with some advice from Brehme and subscriptions to photography magazines.
His central subjects were nudes, folk art and rituals, particularly burials and decorations, shop windows, urban streets and everyday interactions. Bravo's photographs almost never depicted trappings of political power, as he preferred subjects of everyday life. He generally used large cameras which created more detail in the finished print. He gave titles to his photos in order to distinguish them; the titles often were often based on Mexican myth and culture.
Manuel Bravo met photographer Tina Modotti in 1927. Bravo had admired Modotti's works in such magazines as Forma and Mexican Folkways even before they met. Through his friendship with Modotti, he met the American photographer Edward Weston and many of the leading artists of the Mexican renaissance, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco. It was Weston who encouraged Manuel Bravo to continue his craft.
Bravo's early artworks were mainly influenced by European Cubism, French Surrealism as well as abstract art. He found his inspiration in two books, one of Picasso and another on Japanese prints with works by Hokusai. However, in the 1930s, the photographer rejected European influences for more Mexican themes and styles, influenced by the art of the Mexican muralism movement. As a result, his works became more complicated with ancient symbols of blood, death and religion along with the paradoxes and ambiguities typical of Mexican culture.
In 1928 his photograph was chosen to be exhibited in the First Salón Mexiсano de la Fotografía. He started to work as a photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways after Modotti’s deportation. For this publication, Bravo began photographing the artworks of the Mexican muralists and other painters. During the rest of the 1930s, Manuel Bravo established his career.
Bravo had his first solo exhibition in 1932. That same year his interest in cinema was stimulated when he worked as a cameraman on Sergey Eisenstein’s film Que Viva Mexico!, which was never completed, and was furthered when he met photographer Paul Strand just as the latter was completing the film Redes (1936). In 1935 the photographer exhibited with Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with catalogue texts written by Langston Hughes and Luis Cardoza y Aragón.
In 1938 the photographer met André Breton, a French Surrealist artist, who promoted Manuel Bravo's works in France, exhibiting them there. Later on, Breton asked him for a photograph for the cover of a catalogue for an exhibition in Mexico. Bravo executed "La buena fama durmiendo" (The good reputation sleeping). Mexican censors rejected the work due to nudity. However, the photograph would be reproduced many times after that.
Between 1938 and 1939 he taught photography at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM) (today the Faculty of Arts and Design, part the National Autonomous University of Mexico). In 1940 his works were included in a surrealist exhibition by André Breton at the gallery belonging to Inés Amor. In the latter half of the 1960s, he worked as a teacher at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos.
From 1943 to 1959 Bravo worked in the Mexican film industry doing still shots, prompting him to experiment some with cinema. He published the book "El arte negro" in 1945; it was his first publication. He collaborated with José Revueltas in an experimental film called Coatlicue in 1949. In 1957 he worked making stills for Luis Buñuel's film entitled Nazarín.
In 1959 Manuel Bravo became a co-founder of the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana along with Gabriel Figueroa, Leopoldo Méndez, Carlos Pellicer and Rafael Carrillo; it produced books on Mexican art. He spent the main part of the 1960s with the project. Since the 1970s his works have been widely exhibited again.
Over the course of his career as a photographer, Bravo held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in more than 200 collective exhibitions. Edward Steichen selected Bravo's photos for MoMA's "The Family of Man" exhibition of 1955 which travelled around the world, seen by more people than any other to date. In 1968, the Palacio de Bellas Artes organized a retrospective of four decades of Manuel Bravo's oeuvre. Later he also exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, both in 1971, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1978, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1983 as well as the National Library in Madrid in 1985.
He co-wrote and produced the photographs for the book "Instante y revelación" along with Octavio Paz in 1982. Between 1994 and 1995 Evidencias de lo invisible, cien fotografías [Evidence of the Invisible, One Hundred Photographs] was displayed at the Fine Arts Museum in New Delhi, the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon and the Imperial Palace in Beijing. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles held a retrospective of Bravo's work in 2001.
Alvarez Bravo continued to photograph until his death. About a year before his death, when he could no longer travel, working primarily in his studio or his backyard and photographing nudes as well as objects that were sent to him from colleagues, friends, and admirers. He stated that “It wasn't the sort of work one can complain about."
Manuel Bravo was the first Mexican photographer to take a militantly anti-picturesque position, in order to avoid stereotyping Mexico's variety of cultures. He was the most important figure in 20th-century Latin American photography.
He had numerous exhibitions of his artworks, worked in the Mexican cinema and founded Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. In addition, Bravo trained most of the next generation of photographers including Héctor García, Nacho López, and Graciela Iturbide.
Manuel Bravo's first important award was first prize for a photo of two lovers on a boat at the Feria Regional Ganadera in Oaxaca. In 1931, he won first prize with an image called La Tolteca at a competition which was sponsored by the La Tolteca company.
Bravo also won the Elias Sourasky Arts Prize in 1974, received Premio Nacional de Arte and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. He was nominated for the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1982. In 1984 Manuel Bravo won the Hasselblad Award in Gothenburg, Sweden; in 1987 received the Master of Photography Prize from the International Center of Photography in New York; in 1991 the Hugo Erfurth International Photography Award and the Agfa Gevaert Prize in Leverkusen, Germany; the nomination as Creador Emérito by CONACULTA in 1993 and Gold Medal Award from the National Arts Club in New York along with the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Grand Cross of Merit Order in Portugal in 1995.
In 1996 Manuel Bravo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association, New York, and the Century Award from the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.
Substantial collections of his works are presented in Mexico and the United States. In 1996 the Centro Fotográfico Álvarez Bravo, a non-profit association, was founded by Francisco Toledo in the city of Oaxaca. It contains six halls for temporary exhibitions of his photos, a permanent collection of 4,000 photographs, as well as works by other notable photographers.
The Fundación Cultural Televisa also has a significant collection of the works by Bravo. This consists of 2,294 images, custody of which is now with the Casa Lamm Cultural Center in Mexico City. Outside of Mexico, two significant collections are presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Frida with Globe, Coyoacan, Mexico
Two pairs of legs
La Hija de los Danzantes
Figuras en el Castillo
El ensueño (The Daydream)
Espejo negro
Parabola optica (Optical Parable)
Xipe Regine
The big fish eats the little one
Classic Theme
The crouched ones
Frida Seated, Puente de Alvarado Studio
Votive Offerings
Skylight
Somewhat Gay and Graceful
And by Night It Moaned
Day of All Dead
Ladder of Ladders
Workers of the Advertisement
The Sympathetic Nervous System
The Good Reputation Sleeping
Fruta Prohibida
The Little Clown
Isabel Villaseñor, Mexico
The Man from Papantla
Sheets / The Eclipse
Paper Game
Portrait of the Eternal
Retrato Desagrable, Mexico
The Little Clown
Triptico, Los Novios de la Falsa Luna
Window on the Agaves
Sombreros, Ecuador
Study of Hands, Tamayo, Mexico
The barber
Books
Street Lights
Pianola
Manuel Bravo believed that popular art is the art of the People. To his mind, a popular painter is an artisan who, is in the middle ages and remains anonymous; his works need no advertisement.
Quotations:
"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."
"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."
"The art called Popular is quite fugitive in character, of sensitive quality, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics that are the essence of the art of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community--rather than being taken from the experiences of other painters in other times and other cultures, which forms the intellectual chain of nonpopular art."
"I served the government of my country many years in accountancy work, handling much abstract money. Interested since always in art, I committed the common error of believing that photography would be the easiest; the memory of intents in other fields make me understand now that I found my road on time."
"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..."
"I feel I have done my part. I think I contributed something, in whatever way I did. I'm at peace in that respect."
During his lifetime, Manuel Bravo married three times. All of his three wives were great photographers in their own right. His first wife was Lola Álvarez Bravo, whom Bravo married in 1925, just at the beginning of his career as a freelance photographer. He taught her the craft of photographing but she never achieved the renown that he did. The marriage produced one son, Manuel. They separated in 1934.
Bravo's second wife was Doris Heyden, a prominent scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, particularly those of central Mexico. His third wife was French photographer Colette Álvarez Urbajtel, whom he married in 1962.
Manuel Bravo fathered five children, Miguel Bravo, Laurencia Bravo, Genoveva Bravo, Aurelia Bravo, and Manuel Bravo.
Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993) was a Mexican photographer and an important figure in the post-revolution Mexican renaissance.
Doris Heyden (1905-2005) was a distinguished scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, in particular, those of central Mexico.
Colette Álvarez Urbajtel (born 1934) is a French-Mexican photographer. Her works, mostly of everyday life, were in black-and-white until 1990. Her work has been exhibited extensively not only in Mexico but also abroad.
Hugo Brehme (1882-1954) was a Mexican-German photographer.
