Manuel Alvarez Bravo
				Mexican, 1902-2002
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Deeply rooted in the culture of the Mexican people, Manuel Alvarez Bravo has created a major body of photographic work the significance of which has gone unrecognized until recent years. He has focused on the subtleties of human interaction, particularly in the lower classes, to make eloquent images of dreams, death, and transient life. Bravo was born in Mexico City, the son and grandson of painters and photographers. He attended a Catholic grade school, later worked as a copy clerk while studying accounting at night school, and became an office boy for the Mexican Treasury Department. He remained with the Treasury Department in a variety of capacities until 1931. He began serious literary studies in 1917, and music and painting studies at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Aries the following year. Bravo became interested in photography in 1922 and purchased his first camera two years later. He experimented with abstract images of folded papers in 1926-1927. In 1926 he received First Prize at the Regional Exhibition in Oaxaca. Bravo met Tina Modotti, who had learned photography as a companion of Edward Weston, in 1927. She deeply influenced and encouraged his work. He began his first significant work soon after their meeting and became a major figure in the blossoming Mexican art movement of the 1930s. Bravo taught photography at the Escuela Central de Aries Plasticas under Diego Rivera in 1929-1930. He began to photograph paintings and murals for Mexican Folkways magazine at this time. In 1930-1931 Bravo was cameraman on Sergel Eisenstein's uncompleted film Que Viva Mexico. He was given his first one-man show of photographs at Galeria Posada in Mexico City in 1932. Soon after, he met Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, both of whom admired his work. He exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City with Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans in 1935 and taught at Hull House in Chicago in 1936. Bravo met André Breton, founder of Surrealism, in 1938 through Diego Rivera. Although he was never a member of the movement, Bravo developed an interest in Surrealist aesthetics and imagery, as evidenced in his strongest personal work. However, during the 1940s and 1950s Bravo did little personal photography, concentrating his attention on cinematography and teaching at the Sindicato de Trabaladores de la Producción Cinematografica de Mexico. He was a founder of El Fondo Editorial de la Plastica Mexicana and has been one of its directors and chief photographer since 1959. He resumed a more active photographic career in the 1960s and continues to live and work in Mexico City.