"I look for the essence of beings and of things, their spirit,
their reality. Interest, experience, moral and aesthetic commitment,
form the third eye of the photographer. There are those who focus it on
the landscape; I feel attracted to human beings."
Lola Alvarez Bravo began her career as a photographer in the
midst of the artistic and political ferment that followed the Mexican
Revolution. In the 1920's and'30s, she moved in the artistic circles of
Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente
Orozco. Mexico's socialistgovernment promoted intellectual freedom and
a greater public role for the arts, which in turn attracted to Mexico
cultural leaders from around the world. Sergey Einstein, André Breton,
D.H. Lawrence, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand and Henri
Cartier-Bresson are only a few of the figures drawn to the country by a
heady idealism and the opportunity to escape convention. When Lola and
her husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, first took up photography in the
late 1920s, there was hardly a more auspicious moment or place to
become a visual artist.
Lola Alvarez Bravo was Mexicos 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
angels, 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 a friend of innumerable artists and writers
(many of whom she photographed), and as owner of a prestigious gallery
that represented the first solo show by her friend Frida Kahlo, the
subject of some of Alvarez Bravos most powerful portraits.
Lola Alvarez Bravo moved to Mexico City from her home town of
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 Manuels influence the share
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 of life lived in the moment.
- excerpt from the book: Lola Alvarez Bravo by Elizabeth Ferrer
Aperture Foundation Books ISBN13:978-1-931788-94-6
Music: Elliot Goldenthal , Chavela Vargas, Lila Downs
from the soundtrack to the film Frida.
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