THE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO was taken in 1938, but in the unexpectedness of its content, it still delivers a mild shock. In the frame, a young woman, naked except for some bandage wrapped around her thighs, waist and feet, lies on her back on a mat outdoors, eyes closed, one leg raised and crossed over the other. Her left arm—which is toward the camera—rests under her head providing us with a full, unobstructed view of her left breast and the shadow it casts over her armpit; the right hand rests at the base of her stomach a few inches below which sprouts the black tuft of her pubic hair. Placed next to the woman, in the foreground, are a few spiky pods of cacti. One of the 20th century's best-known photographers, Manuel Alvarez Bravo of Mexico, shot this picture, titled 'The Good Reputation Sleeping', as the cover image for a Surrealist art exhibition catalogue, but it was deemed too bold to be printed.
Another of Alvarez Bravo's photographs shows a young man, also lying flat on his back on the ground, eyes almost shut—except that he is dead, his face streaked with blood that has also drenched the ground under his head. 'Striking Worker, Assassinated' (Obrero en huelga, asesinado) was shot in 1934 and between its in-your-face gruesomeness and the frank, if somewhat loopy, eroticism of the first photo, Alvarez Bravo seems to have set the tone for the future of photography, right up until the present.
Both of these are among the 50 black-and-white images (silver gelatin prints made from the original negatives) on display at the Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi as part of an exhibition called In Light of Mexico—Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Octavio Paz: A Dialogue between Photography and Poetry.
For Indians, Mexico is a faraway land situated on the opposite side of the globe. This physical distance, along with the absence of any historical linkages, means that it barely impinges on the Indian consciousness, unlike, say, the Caribbean islands—with calypso, Vivian Richards, VS Naipaul—which are located not far from Mexico. But the inexorable tugs of globalisation are bringing us all closer—eight months ago the Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi brought the diminutive, charismatic and celebrated Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide to town for the opening of her show. They have followed up with the current exhibition of 50 photographs taken by Alvarez Bravo, who was Iturbide's mentor.
Alvarez Bravo, who died in 2002 at the age of 100, began his career as a photographer in the early 1920s. The decade-long Mexican Revolution—a partially successful attempt to move Mexico from a dictatorship to a constitutional republic, that had claimed at least a million lives—had ended in 1920 and the Mexican Renaissance in the arts had just begun. This movement was marked by a quest for a new national identity—one which embraced both the currents of modernity and Mexico's traditional sociocultural roots.
Taken between the 1920s and the 1940s, the photos on display at Instituto Cervantes reflect these twin objectives. Their subject is the everyday and traditional Mexico as seen among its people, things and places; but the treatment of these subjects is very 'modern'—even today they feel fresh and unconventional.
The curators of the show have interspersed Alvarez Bravo's photographs with short pieces of verse by his friend Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate. Unlike Alvarez Bravo, Paz had a direct Indian connection. He served as Mexico's ambassador to India from 1962-68 and wrote a book about India entitled Vislumbres de la India (In Light of India). The juxtaposition seems appropriate, if only because in his Nobel acceptance speech, Paz described poetry in words that could apply to photography as well. "Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present," he said. 'Facing Time,' a poem Paz dedicated to Alvarez Bravo, makes references to particular photos of his that the curators have helpfully placed right next to the poem (The face of reality/the face of every day/is never the same face/Blood eclipse: the face of the murdered worker/planet fallen on the pavement).
Paz too grappled with reconciling modernity with tradition. "The search for modernity led us to discover our antiquity, the hidden face of the nation," he said in his Nobel speech. A little later in the talk, he described his own artistic journey. "One day I discovered I was going back to the starting point instead of advancing: the search for modernity was a descent to the origins. Modernity led me to the source of my beginning, to my antiquity. Separation had now become reconciliation."
In a large measure then, a 'modern' outlook is about how one sees; in Alvarez Bravo's photos it is also about what one chooses to see—and his choice of subject, in what could be called a typically modern fashion, is always the non-grandiose. It is the ordinary, the commonplace—indigenous Mexican men and women (that is, those who have no European blood); a worker; a folded mattress; a cactus plant; a nondescript grave. Even his portraits of the well-known, such as the artist Frida Kahlo or the muralist Diego Rivera, have a relaxed, informal air about them.
Looking at these photos 70-90 years after they were taken, one can see why Alvarez Bravo is called a pioneer. His abstract photos—credited to the influence of Surrealism—of folded paper ('Paper Games'), of slices of vegetable balanced atop one another ('Naked Jicamas'), or of a folded mattress ('Mattress') would not be out of place in a magazine advertisement today—all we would have to do is add some gloss and colour.
Indeed, given that almost a century has passed since the earliest photos on display were taken, it is very possible, in some cases, to overlook their originality. The oversight could also extend to the quality of realism in the images—the native man posing for a portrait but looking away from the camera ('Man from Papantia'); the pensive girl seemingly shot unawares as she leans over the balcony ('The Daydream'); or the man and woman, two strangers, walking past each other on the street ('How Small the World Is')—all three are among Alvarez Bravo's iconic images and yet none would be considered radically unusual today. What lends them a timeless quality is the integrity of their composition—things such as the placing of the human figures and the other elements, and the contrast of light and shadow—which speaks across decades of development in photographic technology.
Alvarez Bravo's photos are uncluttered so they make an instantaneous impression, holding your gaze until the mind is engaged and apprehends deeper connections. In the famous photos—such as that of a snail perched atop a pumpkin, the pattern on its shell mimicking the pattern on the skin of the vegetable; or of an ordinary grave with lit candles and flowers; or of a boy drinking water from a tap—one sees a celebration of the photographer's native land, but also a wider and universal celebration of the human condition. Modernity for him meant being open to and adapting international trends and techniques to capture the local and the humble.
In Light of Mexico—Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Octavio Paz: A Dialogue between Photography and Poetry will be on view at Instituto Cervantes, 48 Hanuman Road, New Delhi until 30 June. For details visit nuevadelhi.cervantes.es/en/default.shtm