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Manuel Alvarez Bravo began photographing in 1924 during Mexico's thriving post-revolutionary artistic renaissance. While his early work embraced Mexico's urban realities, its peasants and workers, and its hauntingly beautiful landscape, Alvarez Bravo's ever-present acknowledgment of the macabre prompted André Breton, the leader of Surrealism in France, to claim him as an exponent of the movement.
Alvarez Bravo won his first award in 1931 and decided to pursue photography as a career. He met André Breton in 1939 and his work was subsequently included in Surrealist exhibitions in Paris. In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired their first Alvarez Bravo works; in 1955, his photographs were included in Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition at MoMA. In 1959 he co-founded the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana to publish books on Mexican art, and from 1980 to 1986 devoted his time to founding and developing the collection of the first Mexican Museum of Photography. Alvarez Bravo received various awards including the National Art Prize (Mexico, 1975), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1975), and the International Center of Photography's Master of Photography Award (1987).
