Manuel Alvarez Bravo

by J. Paul Getty Museum

Manuel Alvarez Bravo is generally recognized to be one of the masters of modern photography and the most significant artist in Mexico today. Born in Mexico City in 1902, Alvarez Bravo spent his youth in the city where visible markers of Mexico's pre-Columbian past, its colonial vestiges, and its modernity all coexist. His life and work have coincided with radical changes in the twentieth century, and he is the last of a generation of artists with direct ties to the avant-garde movements in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Working within this cultural renaissance, Alvarez Bravo discovered complex ways to frame the disparity between urban and rural realities into a poetic vision of Mexico's modern life, its cultural differences and social contradictions. Divergence and apparent discontinuity are therefore two hallmarks of Alvarez Bravo's photography.