The NY Times Lens blog recently published a short article on Lola Álvarez Bravo (1907 - 1993), once married to Mexican photography icon Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902 - 2002). The article also contains a slide show that serves as an excellent introduction to her work.
An archive of Lola Bravo's vintage prints was only discovered in 2007 when James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who had met the photographer in the early 1990s, received a call from a museum in Mexico City. It transpired that "relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had bought her old apartment, had been safe guarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints." It is those photos, now known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, that are shown in the article's slide show and that form the basis for an exhibit that will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23, 2013.
It is obvious from looking at these photos that Lola Bravo had not only a strong sense of what was visually compelling but also a social conscience that she employed repeatedly in her street photos of the poor in Mexico's Oaxaca region in the 1920's. There are also excellent portraits of such artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and several fascinating photo montages.
It would be interesting to know the interraction, if any, between Tina Modotti and Lola Bravo. Lola's husband Manuel, according to Wikipedia, met Modotti in 1927, the same period from which the instant Gonzalez-Rendon archive dates. The meeting had a profound impact on Manuel's career, and he eventually took over Modotti’s job as photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways after her deportation. Although the interraction between Manuel Bravo and Modotti is fairly well documented, there is almost no mention of Lola Bravo to be found.
No comments:
Post a Comment