Manuel Alvarez Bravo essays

Manuel Alvarez Bravo essays Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born on February 4, 1902 in Mexico City. He was the son and grandson of photographers ands painters. When Bravo was just an adolescent the Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 and lasted through 1920. Bravo can remember running over the hills in Mexico to find a dead soldier just lying their abandoned. During the Revolution nearly one million Mexicans had died due to starvation and fighting between rebels struggling for power . Throughout his twenties Bravo worked as an office boy for the Mexican Treasury Department and did a variety of other things for them until he quit on 1931. His first photography teacher was a man named Hugo Brehme. From Brehme, Bravo learned how to blur through darkroom techniques. Bravo bought his first camera when he was twenty-four years old. Bravo can remember exactly where he got his first camera, I bought my first camera from a firm called Islas Hermanos . Bravo also bought a Verito lens, which diffuses the scene before it, and learned the oil-pigment bromoil developing process, which gave photographers something of the blurred color surface of paintings . Bravo played around with abstract images of folded paper. Next he begun to photograph paintings and murals for a magazine called Mexicana Folkways. In the 1930s Bravo changed from abstract to scenes of modern life in Mexico City. Bravo once said, I was born on Mexico, have lived in Mexico, have gone outside Mexico, and have missed my country. I have returned to my country and I am content with my country: good, bad-and worse than bad still I am enchanted by my country . B ravo loved his country and that is where many of his photographs come from. Bravo later met an American photographer named Edward Weston and his lover Tina Modotti who was also a photographer. From them Bravo learned the clear focus. In 1929 Bravo taught photography at the Esculea Central de Ar ...