Getty Museum
The Good Reputation
Creator
Manuel Álvarez BravoMexican Photographer · 1902–2002
All works by this person →A self-taught photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo purchased his first camera at age twenty while working at a government job. His earliest success at photography came around 1925, when he won first prize in a local photographic competition in Oaxaca. He returned to Mexico City, where he had been born, and in 1927 met Tina Modotti, who introduced him to a lively intellectual and cultural environment
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1938
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Mexican
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Visually inspired by the bandages that dancers use to wrap their legs before practicing, Manuel Alvarez Bravo wrapped his model's wrists, thighs, hips, and feet with dressings supplied by a physician friend. Juxtaposing her tender flesh and serene slumber with thorny cactus pears from the local market, Alvarez Bravo photographed the model, Alicia, on the roof of the national arts school where he taught. He created this triptych, or series of three images, for the cover of an exhibition catalogue for a Surrealist exhibition that André Breton organized in Mexico City in 1939, using the multiple format for emphasis. Predictably, the prominent display of pubic hair standing out against the bandages drove censors to declare the work unacceptable for the cover.
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