Artist: Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Yancey Richardson presents Manuel Álvarez Bravo, featuring a selection of iconic photographs by the legendary Mexican artist and coinciding with RAGE™, the gallery’s exhibition of new work by Tania Franco Klein. Considered one of the most important photographers in the history of the medium, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002) is regarded as a towering figure both in Mexico and in the history of Modernism in Latin America more broadly. With photographs that range from nudes, still lifes and quiet street scenes to portraits and records of political violence, Álvarez Bravo used photography to explore the subtle mysteries laying just beneath the surface of the perceptible.

The photographs in the exhibition explore the way Álvarez Bravo transformed scenes of quiet and solitude into powerful forms of metaphor and suggestion. In La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping) and El Sonador (The Dreamer), subjects are shown lost in slumber, while in El ensueño (The Daydream) a young woman is caught up in the transportive act of daydreaming. Each of these figures are etched into their specific material settings while at the same time they are led elsewhere by their imagination and Álvarez Bravo’s framing and treatment of light. In other images, such as Retrato de lo Eterno (Portrait of the Eternal) and Los agachandos (The Crouched Ones), Álvarez Bravo uses light and deep shadow to completely alter otherwise commonplace moments, showing how the photographic image can introduce a mode of perception that not only expands our understanding of the world, but also complicates—even unsettles—the presumption of its familiarity.

Represented in museum collections worldwide, Manuel Álvarez Bravo was the subject of a 175 piece solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997. The work of the artist is currently on view at the Getty Center in the exhibition Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography, a selection of works by 13 influential photographers tracing Mexican photography from the late 1920s to the mid-2010s.