Daydreaming | Photos by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 1928-39

 Manuel Alvarez Bravo, The Daydreaming, 1931                          The Daughter of the Dancers, 1933 

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Figures in the Castle, 1920s

 Two Pairs of Legs, 1928-1929                                                                    Sergei Eisenstein, 1930's

                                 The Sympathetic Nervous System, 1929                                                           Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Optical Parable, 1931

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, The Crouched Ones, 1932-34 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Laughing Mannequins, 1930

André Breton, Mexico, 1938

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002) was Mexico’s first principal artistic photographer and is the most important figure in 20th-century Latin American photography.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Good Reputation Sleeping, 1938-39 

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, The Dreamer, 1931

In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist André Breton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo’s work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity.

Breton said about Bravo: "He has shown us everything that is poetic in Mexico. Where Manuel Álvarez Bravo has stopped to photograph a light, a sign, a silence, it is not only where Mexico's heart beats, but also where the artist has been able to feel, with a unique vision, the totally objective value of his emotion."

Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, André Breton, 1930's