Reva Brooks

Reva Brooks (May 1913 - 24 January 2004) was a Canadian photographer who did much of her work in and around San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. The San Francisco Museum of Art chose Reva Brooks as one of the top 50 women photographers in history.

Reva Silverman was born in Toronto, Ontario in May 1913. Her parents, Moritz Silverman and Jenny Kleinberg had immigrated to Canada from Poland. Moritz arrived in Toronto in 1905 and began work in the Jewish garment district on Spadina Avenue, and after three years had saved enough money to send for Jenny, whom he married at once. Moritz Silverman set himself up in a tailoring and pressing shop, where Reva and her six siblings were raised.

In 1935 Reva married the artist Frank Leonard Brooks. While they were on a trip to San Miguel de Allende she took up photography. The couple were early members of what became a well known colony of artists in that town. They arrived in 1947, planning to stay for a year while Frank Brooks studied painting, and eventually stayed for fifty years. On 12 August 1950 Leonard and Reva Brooks, as well as Stirling Dickinson and five other American teachers, were deported from Mexico. The official reason was that they did not have proper work visas but the cause may have been a falling out with the owner of a rival art school. Leonard Brooks managed to get the order lifted so they could return through his contact with General Ignacio M. Beteta, to whom he had once given advice on painting and whose brother Ramón Beteta Quintana was an influential politician at the national level.

In September-October 1950, before the official opening, the Instituto Allende in San Miguel gave an exhibition of the work of local artists. Works by both Leonard and Reva Brooks were included in this show. In 1952, Reva Brooks sold one of her most famous photographs, a picture of a mother grieving over her dead child, to Edward Steichen, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 1955 some of her work was included in the MOMA's The Family of Man exhibition, one of the first major exhibitions of photography. She participated in many exhibitions in cities around the world, with her last solo show being at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2002. She died in San Miguel de Allende in 2004.