Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of the founders of modern photography, is considered the greatest representative of 20th century Latin American photography. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. He was born in the city center of the Mexican capital on February 4th, 1902. At age 12, to help with the family economy after the passing of his father, he interrupted his education and started working in a textile factory and eventually, at the General Treasury of the Nation. His grandfather, a painter, and his father, a teacher, were photography enthusiasts. This early discovery of the possibilities of the camera drove Álvarez Bravo to explore every photographic procedure and graphic technique in a self-taught manner.

He approached pictorialism initially, influenced by his studies in painting at the Academia de San Carlos. Later, he became interested in modern aesthetics, specifically in cubism and the possibilities of abstraction. In 1930, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico, leaving her position at the Mexican Folkways magazine to Álvarez Bravo. This is how he got his start in documentary photography, by working for the muralist painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure in the period following the Mexican Revolution, known as the Mexican Renaissance. This was a period whose artistic richness was due to the happy —though not always serene—, coexistence of an eagerness for modernization and a search for an identity, in which archeology, history, and ethnology played a relevant role. Álvarez Bravo incarnates both tendencies in the field of the visual arts.

From 1943 to 1959 he worked in cinema shooting still photography, a job that led him to produce some personal experiments.

Throughout his life he held more than 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 group exhibitions. According to numerous critics, the work of this “poet of the lens” expresses Mexico’s essence, but the humanist outlook reflected in his oeuvre, as well as the aesthetic, literary, and musical references it contains, bestows upon it a universal dimension.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo died on October 19th, 2002, at age 100.

Photograph: Manuel Álvarez Bravo Self-portrait with grille, Coyoacán, Mexico City, May 1982. Courtesy Manuel Álvarez Bravo Archive.