![Kiln/[La Quema]](/api/proxy-image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.getty.edu%2Fiiif%2Fimage%2Fb4dbb1a5-4ea2-4c58-8514-6e7e0a37038f%2Ffull%2F808%2C%2F0%2Fdefault.jpg)
Getty Museum
Kiln/[La Quema]
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
- negative 1957; print 1974
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Mexican
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- d6ada6d5-03da-4230-b5f1-d2b924c30fe7
From the Getty Museum record
Billowing, black smoke fills the sky, obscuring the grazing burro on the right, in this photograph of an adobe brick kiln. Manuel Alvarez Bravo called this image *La Quema*, a term meaning "the fire" or "the burning." Depicting a landscape threatened by human industry, the image may symbolize more sinister historical events. Alvarez Bravo, who came of age during the violent Revolution of 1910-1920, often saw dead bodies burning in the street. The Mexican people may have viewed the kiln--a site of fiery transmutations--as an allusion to the Spaniards' conquest and purging of the Aztecs in the 1500s. About this image, one historian has said: "The photograph does not project sorrow or excessive drama, but quiet and noble resignation. Even the human figure standing at the base of the kiln/pyramid has an attitude, extremely Mexican in character, of resigned acceptance of destiny."
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