Manuel Alvarez Bravo  (Mexican, 1902-2002) 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902–2002) was a photographer best known for creating unexpected juxtapositions that capture the social and political atmosphere of his country. He studied painting at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Arts in Mexico City in 1918, and was influenced by European photographers, such as Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908–2004), both of whom share Bravo’s interest in heightening the mundane through photography. Growing up during the Mexican Revolution and encountering the indigenous muralist movement focused Bravo’s photographic language on his immediate surroundings and cultural heritage. The juxtapositions in Bravo’s photographs parallel the work of the Surrealists in Europe. Ladder of Ladders(1931) creates a composition suggesting spiritual ascension out of ladders, coffins, and a phonograph. In The Crouched Ones(1934), Bravo frames a row of workers, sitting on bar stools with their backs to the viewer, by a shadow that obscures their heads, and a chain that seems to wrap around their feet. Starting in the 1940s, Bravo photographed a series of landscapes that documented the natural terrain of Mexico with a wide-angle perspective, reminiscent of film. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in 1971. His work is currently held in several museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.