The S K Josefsberg Studio is pleased to present the work of one of the 
great modern masters, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, on view at the gallery 
January 17 - February 23, 2002. 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City, into an adept artistic family; his grandfather was a professional portraitist and his father, a teacher by trade, actively pursued painting, photography and writing--the author of several produced plays. Although his formal education was nominal, Alvarez Bravo's voracity for reading and the visual arts exercised itself early on. "As a boy, whenever I wouldn't go out with my friends on Sundays, I would go to one of two museums that were very close to where I lived. . . . One museum was the Anthropology and History Museum which was pre-Hispanic art. . . . The other museum was the San Carlos Museum, which contains European art." Later on, after having left school and entering the work force, Alvarez Bravo would take evening classes in Literature and studied painting and music at the Academia San Carlos, a conservative art academy. These familial, literary and institutional influences would mold a sophisticated and thoughtful eye.

During this formative time for Alvarez Bravo, Mexico was liberating itself. He was only eight when the revolution ensued, and it would last more than a decade. At its end, the revolutionary spirit would incite an upsurge of creativity, as seen through the work of not only Alvarez Bravo, but also Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, among others. It was this fertile production which attracted many American and European artists to the local circles, including Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, André Breton, D.H. Lawrence, and Sergei Eisenstein, to name a few.

Surveying the breadth of Alvarez Bravo's work, pieces have been characterized as pictorial, vernacular, surrealist and, on occasion, political. Yet what is most apparent in any given image is that his heart is with the people and culture of his homeland; the intimacy with which each subject captured resonates. He is by far considered one of the foremost masters of modern photography, having exercised his skill as a craftsman with the approach of a quizzical and sensitive philosopher.

This exhibition of Manuel Alvarez Bravo will show concurrently with the J. Paul Getty Museum's major retrospective of the artist's work (November 13, 2001 - February 17, 2002) and will include several of his seminal images from the 1920's and 1930's. 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo will celebrate his 100th birthday February 4, 2002.

Read a review from the Febuary 7th edition of 'The Oregonian'