Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Manuel Alvarez Bravo's photographs of women are ethereal, carnal, dreamlike evocations of the subconscious landscape
Apr 12, 2002 | The second most refreshing thing about Manuel Alvarez Bravo is that he's not Ansel Adams. The first is his photographs -- they are dreamy, literally. But that's not news. Bravo, who turned 100 on Feb. 4, has had his work described as dreamlike for much of the last century. Adams was a master landscape photographer, but Bravo, whose contributions to 20th century art are at least as significant as Adams', is a master at chronicling the interior, making photographs that illustrate the subconscious landscape.
This is especially true of "Nudes: The Blue House," a new book of photographs by Bravo, some taken as recently as the '90s, some dating back to the 1930s, with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes. It's a small book of about three dozen images of women -- Bravo likes women -- all nude or partially so and all, it seems, captured while in the middle of some sort of implied narrative.
That's Bravo: He's always telling the story without a plot, the story that never stops -- the tightly constructed tale of whatever is going on at the moment he takes the picture. Like a dream, it makes perfect sense while you're in it. If Cartier-Bresson was champion of the decisive moment, Bravo's pictures have made the indecisive moment iconic.
Though he worked with models (not professional ones) to produce the images in "Nudes: The Blue House," often he has not captured poses so much as anti-poses, the evocative moments between those self-conscious instances when model and photographer conceptually come together. "My work is completely natural and spontaneous," he once told Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper. It is also unnatural and carefully planned, albeit instinctively, not consciously.
Our tendency is to look at photographs slowly, to amble through the gallery or page through the book, pausing at each new image, taking it all in, but Bravo's nudes should be flashed on a wall, seen as a flipbook, perceived subliminally, run past furtively, then back again. There's a longing in his images that's better experienced by glancing at them than studying them pensively. "I don't look for anything," Bravo told the New York Times, "I discover things."
One of the things he seems to have discovered over and over during the seven or eight decades of his career is the exhilaration of discovery. But the leap Bravo made that has always given his work a perpetually modern, fresh spirit is that his photos are not about him, they're not even about their subject -- they're about the person who's discovering them.
When I was a college student, I was lucky enough to work as a teaching assistant for film director Alexander Mackendrick ("The Ladykillers," "The Man in the White Suit," "The Sweet Smell of Success"). He used to say that movies take place in a theater located inside the head of each person in the audience. Bravo hangs his pictures in a gallery at that same location.
The classic narrative hook of a quest, or of longing, is one of the themes that runs through "Nudes." The women are often looking at something, as if for the first time, or seeking something or on their way somewhere.
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