Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Optical Parables

Mexico’s most prominent photographer turned 100 this year. Sadly, he died just a few weeks ago, before he could join us; the Walker was already bringing to town a Getty Museum retrospective of 100 of Alvarez Bravo’s works covering the many phases of his long career. Born into a family of painters and photographers, Alvarez Bravo came of age during Mexico’s post-revolutionary 1920s renaissance, when dozens of artists from around the world flooded into the country. While working as an accountant, he refined his art and distilled ideas from the creative ferment around him, even briefly working as Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematographer. In the process he became the first Mexican photographer to move past formal realism, using his finely tuned compositional eye to capture meanings more intangible than just the literal images his camera collected. His style was equally hard to pin down. Though he often made use of surreal imagery, he didn’t consider himself a surrealist. Nor was he as overtly political as his peers, although one of his most compelling images shows an assassinated labor agitator lying in a pool of his own blood. His work is deceptively ordinary, largely trained on the everyday events of his Mexico City environs, and yet confidently evokes an array of modernist styles, from crisp formalism to obliquely erotic dream imagery. If he preferred not to confine himself to a single method, it may be because he saw the image itself as his overriding artistic concern. As he put it in an often-repeated motto, “Shoot what you see, not what you think.” Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org