Bravo Manuel Alvarez

(b Mexico City, 4 Feb 1902).

Mexican photographer. He studied painting and music at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1918. In 1922, after training as an office worker, he began to take an interest in photography, and in 1923 he met Hugo Brehme shortly before buying his first camera. In 1929, through his friendship with Tina Modotti, he got to know Diego Rivera. In 1930, when Modotti left Mexico, he provided illustrations for Francis Toor’s book Mexican Folkways. From 1930 to 1931 he was cameraman for Eisenstein’s film Viva Mexico. Subsequently he met Paul Strand and Cartier-Bresson and became friendly with Mexico’s leading painters and writers. In 1938 he met André Breton, who was visiting Mexico and who was deeply impressed by the mysterious and suggestive nature of his photographs. Breton was keen to enlist him for the Surrealist cause and published some of his photographs in Minotaure.

Bravo Manuel Alvarez


       

1930
Frida Kahlo

1935
     

1940
      

 

1956