Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 1902-2002.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo died on Saturday, October 19, 2002 at his residence in Mexico City. Alvarez Bravo was virtually the last surviving artist who had a direct connection to the avant-garde art movements that took place in Mexico during the 1920s and '30s, and for decades, was one of the most highly regarded artists in his country.

Born in Mexico City in 1902, Alvarez Bravo took up photography in the 1920s and came to prominence in the 30s. Through his associations with Tina Modotti, Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvarez Bravo was introduced to new approaches to photography and a stimulating intellectual circle of outsiders. When Modotti handed over her photography position at Mexico Folkways magazine to Alvarez Bravo in 1930, Alvarez Bravo was able to gain valuable experience photographing the people and particulars of Mexico. Native subjects became the focus of his images and remained so for the rest of his life.

Alvarez Bravo was influenced by Weston's method of isolating and abstracting details from an environment and went on to create images of urban landscapes and Mexican life informed by this aesthetic. Utilizing oppositions of form and meaning, he was able to produce photographs that resonated with mystery and transcended cliched views of Mexican culture. He was commended by Cartier-Bresson for his exaltations of the everyday, and in 1935 the two exhibited their work together.

In the late 1930s Alvarez Bravo taught at San Carlos Academy in Mexico and in 1938, met Andre Breton. The surrealist leader commissioned him to create a cover image for the catalog of a surrealist exhibition in Mexico and invited him to exhibit his works in Paris. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City began acquiring Alvarez Bravo's works in 1942, and in 1955 his photographs were included in the "Family of Man" exhibition curated by Edward Steichen.

During the 1960s, Alvarez Bravo was employed as the photographer for art books published by Fondo Editorial de la Plastica Mexicana, an organization that he had helped create, and continued to work there until 1980. He then gained employment at the Mexican media empire Televisa, which published a three-volume set of his works. In 1996 Alvarez Bravo's body of photographs was placed in the newly created Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca City, Mexico, and in the following year, a major exhibition of Alvarez Bravo's photographs was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art. The J. Paul Gerry Museum in Los Angeles celebrated Alvarez Bravo's 100th birthday in February 2002 with another significant exhibition of his works.

An exhibition of Alvarez Bravo's photographs is currently on display at the St. Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, until January 5, 2003 [Ed. note: see Roberto Tejada's feature article on pp. 15-16 for more on Alvarez Bravo.]