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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Review |
Bare Naked Lady and Other Classic Moderns
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| A celebration of the iconic Mexican photographer’s home, and a universal celebration of the human condition |
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MANUEL ALVAREZ BRAVO |
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| In the Temple of the Red
Tiger, 1949.
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| T |
HE 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).
| MANUEL ALVAREZ BRAVO |
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Optical Parable, 1931.
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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.
| MANUEL ALVAREZ BRAVO |
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How Small the World Is, 1942.
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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
Himanshu Bhagat is a Delhi-based freelance writer.
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