Lola Álvarez Bravo

Abstract

Lola Álvarez Bravo was one of a handful of artists who pioneered the development of modem photography in her country. Her euvre is exceptional because of the compelling quality of much of her imagery, and also because she mastered such diversc modes of creative expression within her chosen artistic medium. Much of her work reflects the social documentary mode that has had such a great impact on Mexican photography. She is also renowned in her country as its greatest portrait photographer, one who documented riearly every celebrated figure in the arts and letters in Mexico in this century. In addition, in the early 19305, Alvarez Bravo experimented with non-traditional photography, particularly with photomontage and with constructed imagery, to a degree then otherwise unknown in Mexico. That she has so few prototypes as a woman is best evinced by the fact that many call her the first female Mexican photographer.1 She remains, neverthelesS, a little-known and marginalized figure. In Mexico, she has had the abiding respect of a close-knit intellectual community. She has received broad public recognition only recently, most notably through a major retrospective exhibition organized in 1992 by the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo, a leading cultural institution in Mexico City.2 The preponderance of information on Alvarez Bravo has been written in Spanish. This essay therefore introduces her achievements to the English reader and broadly outlines her long career, which spans half a century.

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