An Homage to Don Manuel on His 100th Birthday: Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Born in Mexico City in 1902 (“in the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods must have been built,” he later wrote), Alvarez Bravo is still living and reportedly still working. He once told interviewer Frederick Kaufman that, in addition to pre-Columbian art, his influences include the Mexico City cathedral and the celebration of mass there; pioneering photographer Eugene Atget, who photographed things in Paris “no other photographer would have thought interesting”; Picasso, whose work “opened the door for me”; filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who was “seeing life, seeing what’s going on” when he advocated including the sound of an airplane overhead in one of his films; and Diego Rivera, who helped Alvarez Bravo recognize “photographable . . . reality” in the street. Alvarez Bravo met several of the surrealists in Mexico, and they admired his photos. But he’s said that his work “is more related to Mexican art and Mexican life than to photographic traditions.”
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Other photographs are more explicitly about vision, such as X-ray Window (1940), which refers to photography itself. Hanging beside the entry to a storefront X-ray service is a grid of six X rays; another is hung just inside at a different angle. With their unique tonal values and luminosity, the X rays make it seem the bones are reaching out to the viewer, while the different perspectives render the space more complex. Here X rays testify both to the power of the photographic process and to that which it cannot capture.
