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Manual Alvarez Bravo was one of the truly great photographers of the twentieth century. His work sprang from a vision born of his time and his culture, but it touched people from every society all over the world. Diego Rivera called his work a profound and discrete poetry. He said it was like those particles suspended in the air that render visible a ray of light as it penetrates a dark room.
I first saw Alvarez Bravo’s work in a book of photographs put together in the 1950’s by Edward Steichen, then the curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, called the “Family of Man”. It was a moving book, which spurred my life long interest in photography as an art form.
It was also the rightful home for work of Alvarez Bravo’s caliber and sensibility. His work is imbued with a heightened awareness of the everyday. Its sense of fleeting time reminds us all of our fragility and connects us in a common bond. It has a quiet humility that comes with the knowledge that the “other” is us.
I met Alvarez Bravo in the late 1960’s in Mexico City. I was struck by how much of the man comes through in his work - his gentle nature, his alert and curious mind, and his subtle humor and quick intelligence. At the time, he was living with his third wife, French photographer, Colette Alvarez-Urbajtel. It is a testimony of his commitment to the medium that all three of his wives were or became photographers in their own right.
Read the complete article . . . Plus view the photographs. |
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Miguel de Allende
