Lola Alvarez Bravo

104 duotone images

Lola Alvarez Bravo was Mexico’s first woman photographer, and her career is exceptional both for its remarkable range and for the compelling quality of her work. Approach­ing photography from multiple angles, she worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, and professional portraitist, while also creating intensely personal images of people, places, and things throughout her native Mexico. In addition, she played a vital role in the Mexican cultural scene, as an inspiring teacher of photography, as friend of innumerable artists and writers (many of whom she photographed), and as owner of a prestigious gallery that pre­sented the first solo show by her friend Frida Kahlo, the subject of some of Alvarez Bravo’s most powerful portraits.

Lola Alvarez Bravo moved to Mexico City from her hometown in Jalisco at age three, and Mexico City remained her home base for the rest of her long life - except for two years in Oaxaca with her then husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo. She began making photographs, under his tutelage, in 1926 and continued photographing for the next sixty years. Although some of her photographs reflect Manuel’s influence - they shared the same cameras and often the same roll of film - Lola achieved her own aesthetic dur­ing the 1940s and ’50s, concentrating on two particularly vivid bodies of work: portraiture and street photography. In these engaging images she found a way to reveal a lyricism in the world around her, producing quiet reveries on life lived in the moment.

This is the first English-language book on Lola Alvarez Bravo to encompass the full range of her work, including some images never before published and several of her little-known photomontages. Eliza­beth Ferrer’s insightful text - based on far-ranging research, including interviews with the artist and her friends - captures the unique spirit of both the photographer and her extraordinary photographs.

LOLA ALVAREZ BRAVO (1903–1993) lived and worked in Mexico City. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, where her archive is maintained. Her work is represented by Throckmorton Fine Art, New York, and Galería Juan Martín, Mexico City.