Getty Museum
Striking Worker Murdered
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
- 1934
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Mexican
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Manuel Alvarez Bravo made this startling photograph of a murdered union leader after following the sound of what he thought were fireworks. Instead, he arrived upon the scene of a sugar-mill labor strike, where shots were being fired. With two frames left in his camera, Alvarez Bravo moved in close and framed his subject so that the the top border of the photograph would press against the victim's body, as if it were the lid of a coffin. A trail of blood spills into the image's lower right corner. Without denying his handsome features or dignity, Alvarez Bravo portrayed the felled worker neither as a hero nor as a martyr, but simply as a sacrifice. As one historian has observed: "The offering of human lives in ancient Mexico was natural; [the worker's] death is no more than a ritual sacrifice to the gods of society, a mere necessity for the well-being of the Mexican people?"
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