New York Life Gallery is pleased to present Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002), curated by Johann Mergenthaler in collaboration with the Estate of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and the Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo. This marks the first presentation of this group of photographs in the Americas, following its initial exhibition at Galerie Carole Lambert, Paris (November 11–December 18, 2025). Expanding on the earlier presentation in Paris, the exhibition includes several works that have never before been exhibited or published.
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“There is time...” Manuel Álvarez Bravo liked to say. Graciela Iturbide, his protégée and now a legend of Mexican photography in her own right, described watching her mentor at work, stopping with his camera, waiting for something to happen. Looking, lingering, passing the time. Álvarez Bravo, she says, taught her about life, and it would seem few people understood life—including its mysteries and shapeshifting surfaces, its very resistance to understanding—as well as he did.
Born in 1902, he lived a hundred years, during which he witnessed the violence of revolution, the rise of a global avant-garde, and the transformation and modernization of his country; in an interview from the 1990s, he lamented that even the light in Mexico City had changed. Although introduced to photography as a child, his first forays into the working world were jobs at a textile factory, the Mexican Treasury department, and for the head of a utilities company—a role that, by happenstance, placed him in contact with a selection of international photography magazines, rekindling that early interest in the medium. Pictorialism still held sway in early 1920s and Álvarez Bravo initially followed suit, studying the techniques that gave photographs an affected, painterly look, before disowning the style (and destroying his early work) in favor of clarity and directness—an approach championed by his friends Edward Weston and Paul Strand. Even so, for Álvarez Bravo things are never straightforward description.
He understood that the camera offered the capacity to bear witness, to transmit social strife. He famously made a bloody image of a murdered striking sugar worker named Resendo in the 1930s. But he tended to be drawn to the subtle dramas of the everyday: stretched light, creeping shadows, obscured figures rendered, despite the sun’s incandescent intensity, with delicate, dreamlike softness. The world as he found it was abstract and strange, waking life its own phantasmagoria. European influences mingled with the ancient and pre-Colombian. Álvarez Bravo created an indelible record of form and ritual in Mexico: angular patterning decorating a ruin in Oaxaca, mannequins frozen mid-laughter in a shop window, the austere geometry of a dense cacti forest, religious iconography, folk festivals and celebrations, portraits of Indigenous communities. He photographed gravesites, funerals, toy skulls, reflecting a culture steeped in the connectedness of life and death. The small altars he constructed in his home, built with small stones and other detritus, suggest that he believed everything, even the most seemingly mundane, was worthy of elevation through attention.
In 1939, André Breton featured Álvarez Bravo in an exhibition called “Mexique” and he appeared in Minotaure, the unofficial organ of the Surrealist movement. Even though his photography is often interpreted in relation to Surrealism, he wasn’t entirely fond of the term, even if there is a bit of automatism, of the subconscious at play, in his description of his process. “It is part of my life to take photographs, to develop,” he said. “It is like eating. It is a spontaneous thing.” He was out on the streets, moving about the countryside, among the physical world making images that not only described but transformed reality. He often cited the influence of Eugène Atget, whose chronicle of a changing fin de siècle Paris was also celebrated by the Surrealists. Both Atget and Álvarez Bravo observed fading architecture, commercial storefronts, eerily empty streets. Locations bound by their historical moment but somehow out of time. Álvarez Bravo credits Atget with shaping his way of looking. “He made me gaze differently. He made me conscious of where I walked and what I saw.” Today, Álvarez Bravo’s gaze does the same for us; it is a reminder of the possibility of revelation close to home.
–Michael Famighetti
Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, beginning with Galería Posada, Mexico City, MX (1932), following his inclusion in the First Salón Mexicano de la Fotografía (1928). His career went on to include over 150 solo exhibitions and participation in more than 200 group exhibitions. Notable presentations include exhibitions at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, MX (including a 1935 exhibition alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson with catalogue texts by Langston Hughes and Luis Cardoza y Aragón, and a retrospective in 1968); the Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1971); the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1978); the National Library of Spain, Madrid, ES (1985); and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2001). His work was included in André Breton’s surrealist exhibition at Galería Inés Amor (1940), Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, and Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955), which traveled
internationally.
Works by the artist are held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Museo de Arte Moderno), Mexico City, MX; Fundación Televisa, Mexico City, MX; Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City, MX; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, FR; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, FR; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris, FR; Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, SE; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Museo de Arte Moderno, Caracas, VE; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, JP; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.