Author Description

Manuel Alvarez Bravo has been the most significant single force in Mexican photography and one of the twentieth century's great Mexican artists, as well as an artist of international acclaim, yet the story of his contribution to the medium of photography has not previously been told in terms of his long and deep artistic development. Alvarez Bravo has produced a body of photographs of exceptional quality throughout his lengthy career: early pictorialist work and other experiments, formal abstractions, images allied to international surrealism, and mature work of many kinds - portraits, urban and rural views, religious and vernacular subject, landscapes, and nudes - all unified in their originality, poetry, and insistence on human dignity. His profound affection for his country and its people has to a great degree formed our lasting image of Mexico itself. This splendid book provides, for the first time, the most representative and faithfully reproduced summation of Alvarez Bravo's life achievement as well as the most complete documentation available. The majority of the book's 175 tritone plates were made from rare vintage prints furnished by the artist or assembled from private collections. Many of these have become well-known icons of modern photography, but close to half of them have never before been published and some not seen or exhibited since the 1930s. Susan Kismaric has conducted an extensive series of interviews and conversations with the artist. Her essay traces his extraordinary career (the artist is now in his ninety-fifth year) and discusses his exceptional body of original work, acknowledging his international stature and the universality of his intimate poetic imagery. It gives us a comprehensive treatment of his oeuvre in terms of his own life, his deep pride in his Mexican heritage, and other avant-garde art and artists of his time in Mexico and elsewhere.