Great black and white photographers, PART 2.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born in Mexico on February, 4 1892 and died on October, 19 2002 (aged 100.) His career as a photographer started from the 1920s to the 1990s. He became a freelance photographer full time in 1930. Then, Bravo started to photograph the work of Mexican muralists and other painters during the rest of the 1930s. He met photographer Paul Strand and and French surrealist artist Andre Breton, this last mentioned helped to promote Alvarez Bravo's work in France, exhibiting it there.

Alvarez Bravo trained the majority of the new generation of photographers. From 1938 to 1939, he taught at the Escuela Central de Artes Plasticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM) and then in the 1960s he taught at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos.

He began to work from 1943 to 1959 in the Mexican fill industry doing still shots. In 1957 he worked making stills for the film Nazarin.

His first publication was in 1945, writing the book “El arte negro.” In 1959 he founded the Fondo editorial de la Plastica Mexicana. Which produces books on Mexican art.