[Deathwatch] Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexican photographer, 100

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Mexican Photographer Alvarez Bravo Dies at 100
Sat Oct 19, 5:21 PM ET

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Famed Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez
Bravo, best known for his dream-like evocations of longing and solitude
in everyday Mexican settings, died on Saturday of natural causes,
officials said. He was 100.

Alvarez Bravo, recently honored with retrospectives of his work in Los
Angeles, Mexico City and Paris, died on Saturday morning in his home in
Mexico City, a spokeswoman for the government's National Fine Arts
Institute said.

His images of street scenes, signs and vendors have been likened to
those of Paris photographer Eugene Atget, and his work also has been
called modernist and surrealist, influenced by a group of foreign
photographers who lived in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, including
Henri Cartier-Bresson.

"My work is completely natural and spontaneous," Alvarez Bravo told
Reuters in an interview in January. He sought to capture in his photos
"life itself, natural reactions and human character -- people's way of
being, walking and expressing themselves."

The promise of a new, post-war idealistic order in the 1920s and 1930s
attracted to Mexico the likes of Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein,
French surrealist writer Andre Breton and photographers including
Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Tina Modotti and Cartier-Bresson.

This was also post-revolution Mexico, where a band of politically
active local artists led by Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose
Clemente Orozco was splashing public buildings with murals about class
struggle and themes of Mexican history, identity and customs.

Against this backdrop, Alvarez Bravo taught himself photography. He
went on to win several amateur contests and in 1931 left his desk job
at the Finance Ministry to pursue his passion for photography full
time.

He traveled throughout Mexico to take photographs for Mexican Folkways
magazine, an assignment that resulted in some of his most poetic images
of Mexican life and festivities.

The 1930s and 1940s were Alvarez Bravo's busiest years, producing
stirring works that explored surrealist themes of sleep, dreams, death
and the erotic as embodied in the 1939 photograph "Good Reputation
Sleeping," showing a nude woman partially wrapped in bandages and lying
on a blanket surrounded by cactus buds.

This period also produced works such as "Striking Worker Murdered,"
taken in 1934 while traveling with Eisenstein in southeast Mexico. The
photo shows the body of a leader of striking sugar mill workers, killed
during a demonstration.