Lola Lvarez Bravo

An outstanding exploration of a photographer, educator, and curator whose work both documented and created change in post-Revolutionary Mexico This stunning and lyrical volume highlights the personal work of Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), one of Mexico’s foremost photographers. Álvarez Bravo worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, portraitist, and educator and played a critical role in her country’s cultural renaissance. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, she captured a profoundly transformative moment for the country’s land, architecture, and people. She remains best known for these works and for her portraits of prominent modernists working in Mexico, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Lola Álvarez Bravo delves into a lesser-known body of work, in which attention to pattern, light, and abstraction guides the artist’s depictions of urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants. It also addresses her role in building and securing the legacy of the post-Revolutionary period, her dialogue with modernist photographers, and her place within the broader cultural sphere, offering new insight into the mutual influence she shared with prominent painters, filmmakers, and literary figures of her time.

Catalogue of an itinerant exhibition presented at the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frido Kahlo starting Oct. 12, 2011, and subsequently at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, Calif., Sept. 23, 2011-Jan. 20, 2013, and at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Ariz., Mar. 30-June 23, 2013.

Essay by Elizabeth Ferrer. Foreword by Douglas R. Nickel.

This publication brings together six artists and designers working in Mexico at midcentury who expanded the horizons of modernism.

"Over 370 tritone photographs, arranged in broadly chronological order, mark Alvarez Bravo's remarkable eighty-year career. Strikingly poetic and richly resonant, the collection includes iconic images as well as over thirty previously unpublished masterpieces. Urban and rural scenes, still lifes, nudes, religious and vernacular subjects, portraits of luminaries including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz: all illustrate the peerless acuity of the photographer's eye. Above all, Alvarez Bravo's work celebrates his beloved Mexico, with its indigenous rituals and age-old customs."--Jacket.

The genre of still life is considered from a wide range of visual perspectives as it spans the history of photography from the early nineteenth century to the present.