A famous, bikini-clad model reclines on the crystalline shore of a beach in Jamaica. The corpse of an SS prison guard floats down a river. Three boys play, chasing each other with sticks in an empty lot in the Bronx. What do these images have in common?
La visitacion, ca. 1934, printed 1971. Brooklyn Museum. Los almiares (Labores), ca. 1940. Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993) was a singular figure in twentieth-century art, a woman whose independence defined the…
Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993) was a singular figure in twentieth-century art, a woman whose independence defined the spirit of the era. “I had a strange need for something and I didn’t know what it was. I was in intense rebellion against certain things that they thought I should do because I was a ‘little woman’ and a ‘young lady,’” Álvarez Bravo told Olivier Debroise for Sin título [Biography of Lola Álvarez Bravo] in 1979.
Lola Alvarez Bravo was overshadowed, and often hindered, by her more famous partner, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, yet a new book reveals that she was a formidable artist and photographer in her own right.
The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Frank’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanish Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.
