Incollect Magazine - Issue 11

72 www.incollect.com Manuel Álvarez Bravo Throckmorton Fine Art Among Latin America’s greatest photographers is Manuel Álvarez Bravo, author of iconic images of the 20th century, including several of the artists Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. He also took one of the most striking, memorable nude images ever made, titled La Buena Fama Dormiendo / The Good Reputation Sleeping, 1938. In this Surrealist-inspired photograph, a nude model lies in the sunlight, wrapped in bandages and surrounded by star cacti. Bravo said the bandages were meant to represent an injured dancer preparing for rehearsal. This dream-like image was commissioned by André Breton, a leader of the Paris-based Surrealist movement, as a cover photograph for the catalogue of an upcoming International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City. Censors objecting to the level of nudity in the photo forbid it from being printed on the catalog cover. Bravo was a political photographer from a period when artists were committed to social and political change — he was a part of the great cultural flowering in Mexico following the Mexican Revolution of 1910–21. His images frequently depict Mexican people and places and are often visually charged, confronting but at the same time atmospheric. Dramatic contrasts of line and tone further heighten these effects. Retrato de una mujer / Portrait of a Woman, 1940s, is a good example, depicting from a very low angle a defiant peasant woman silhouetted against the sky. She appears larger than life, heroic. Bravo was a friend and confidant of artists and photographers of the 20th century, including Edward Weston, from whom he learned “the art of abstracting everyday objects into interesting forms”, as one critic put it, and making everyday life feel mysterious. Bravo influenced countless other photographers across Latin America, including Flor Garduño, who began working as his assistant in 1979 and from whom she learned the rudiments of photography. The Daughter of the Dancers / La hija de los danzantes, 1933. La Buena Fama Durmiendo / The Good Reputation Sleeping, 1938.