Photographs Capture Mexico

PHOTOGRAPHY

Revelaciones

by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

at the Sackler Museum

through November 8

He knows the precise sorrows formed by the shadows of the penumbra over the land, daily sidewalks, between doors and windows, and the little trees that never finish drying out lining the irremediable streets."

Diego Rivera thus paid tribute in 1945 to the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, an artist who remains little-known in this country after an illustrious career spanning more than 50 years. The Sackler's exhibition of Bravo's work, titled Revelaciones, offers a fine introduction to his achievement.

The photos, drawn from all stages of Bravo's career, convey a sense of the precision Rivera praised. Bravos most striking characteristic is a crystalline, sometimes stark vision of his country's landscape and people. Light and shadow appear as palpable entities in these photos. Bravo's clearsightedness proves especially valuable in portraying the reality of Mexico, a nation so steeped in stereotype for Americans. His uncompromising view drains these images of any sentimentality or quaintness. At their best, these scenes of everyday Mexican life and death appear iconic and timeless.

Revelaciones showcases some of Bravo's most consistent and fascinating concerns. His art is one of contrasts and striking visual juxtapositions. Careful observation of light and shadow corresponds to his interest in the differences between life and death, real and not real, Old World and New.

While Bravo's contemporaries, especially the Surrealists, experimented with many of the same innovations, Bravo's position as a Mexican artist adds another dimension to his work. As a citizen of a nation characterized by profound cultural exchange between Indian and European, Bravo works in at least two visual frames of reference.

One of the exhibition's most stunning images, entitled "Los Agachados" (The Crouching Ones), demonstrates this double significance. In the photo, a row of men are seated at a restaurant counter with their backs to the camera, apparantly eating or drinking. Their heads hidden in brutal shadow, their bodies appear in stark relief against the shade inside the restaurant, strangely lifeless. The startling image, with its oddly posed figures, echoes the Surrealist attempts to defamiliarize the human body and confuse the boundary between shadow and reality. But, in juxtaposing images of plenty and those of descending doom, "Los Agachados" also resonates with ancient Indian ideas about the continuity, coexistence and interdependence of life and death.

The commentary accompanying the exhibition concentrates entirely on the pre-Columbian influences on Bravo's igonography. While this focus is valuable to the modern-day American viewer, it also constitutes the show's only weakness, denying some of the power of Bravo's work by excluding its contemporary significance.

For example, a radiant image of a boy sipping from a shadowy stream of falling water is entitled "Sed Publica" (Public Thirst). The commentary gives some interesting information about ancient sacrifice rituals and the Aztec's conception of water as life source. But Bravo's provocative title refers to a contemporary socio-economic reality which the commentary ignores. Similarly, the series of female nudes titled "Xipe" are explained solely in reference to the ancient "flayed goddess" of the same name. Yet the headless images of bodies criss-crossed with jagged shadows and leaves bear a resemblence to Man Ray's and other Surrealists' work with their slicing of the female figure. The oddly ahistorical commentary aligns Bravo only with the past, drawing no connection between his art and the ideas of his contemporaries.

In addition to the experimental pieces, the show includes portaits of Bravo's interesting acquaintances: Frida Kahlo, Sergei Eisenstein and Andre Breton. Revelaciones provides a valuable opportunity to see some of Bravo's finest work. His inspired vision offers American audiences a landscape that is new and exceedingly real.