Museum says Bravo to photographs of Mexico

Suzie Harrison

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico’s foremost photographer, was known as

a visual poet whose black-and-white images captured the essence of

Mexico’s history and cultural strata.

The breadth of his work is on display at the Orange County Museum

of Art in an exhibition that opened this month.

“We had planned to do this exhibit as a celebration of Bravo’s

centennial year,” said Brian Langston, spokesman for the museum. “It

turned out to really be an homage, his having died a few weeks ago.”

The exhibit has been well received, with more than 320 people

attending the festivities opening night.

Running concurrently in the same gallery is an exhibit called “The

Spirit of Mexico,” which explores the culture, the people and draw of

Mexico through black-and-white photography. Edward Weston, Henri

Cartier-Bresson and Flor Garduno’s work compliments Bravo’s and

serves as a tribute to Bravo’s lasting influence on Mexican

photography.

“We’ve correlated the two exhibits for logistic and artistic

reasons,” Langston said. “It’s a perfect complement to the Bravo

collection.”

The Bravo exhibit has been curated by Victor Zamudio-Taylor and

was organized by Casa Lamm Cultural Center in Mexico. “The Spirit of

Mexico” is curated by Orange County Museum of Art’s Sarah Vure.

Born and educated in Mexico, Bravo produced more than 2,300 works

during his career. He became interested in photography in 1922, and

his early works are said to be emblematic of the formal concerns that

would span his career. Later, it was noted that his work focused on a

modernist aesthetic, with attention to purity and form.

Pictures of trees and shadows share space with a picture of a

naked female form that contrasts with a shot of a lazy dog enjoying

an afternoon nap.

“I think that this blend of modernist technique and style with

indigenous themes, setting and subject matter is very fascinating,”

Langston said. “It’s fascinating and reminds us what a hot bed of

artistic location Mexico was.”

In the early modernist period, Langston said, artists flocked to

Mexico from all around the world to be a part of the life there.

“The show is unique in that the photographs were selected by Bravo

himself,” Langston said.

The spirit and thirst of life comes through his photographs that

span his life time. “Fire Workers,” which was shot in 1935, captures

two firefighters standing side by side in front of a concrete

building in full gear but without fire, a snapshot from another time.

“Tombs in a Cemetery” shows us a poignant display of Bravo capturing

life in every dimension.

Artist David P. Levine of Newport Beach seemed to enjoy the

exhibit.

“I think the photographs resonate,” Levine said. “We lived in

Mexico in 1940 and knew many artists there. “The photographs are so

familiar, the later ones so surrealistic -- to us it’s a connection

traveled.”

Levine said that the work showed that Bravo had his own vision of

how to express himself.

“Bravo’s sense of drama is very strong, very good. It’s

interesting to see the connections between Bravo, Weston and

Cartier-Bresson,” Levine said.