Lola Alvarez Bravo

Lola Álvarez Bravo (April 3, 1903 – July 31, 1993) was a Mexican photographer. She was a key figure (along with Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and her husband Manuel Álvarez Bravo) in Mexico's post-revolution renaissance.

Early life

She was born Dolores Martinez de Anda to wealthy parents in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico. Her mother died when Lola was two years old and her father died of a heart attack five years later in 1916. She and her brother were sent to live with their older half brother in Mexico City. She received a traditional education at Colegio del Sagrado Corazón.

She is quoted as saying I don't know why since childhood, I had the idea that I wanted to do something not everybody did. What I've hated most about my life is that they order me around and they limit my freedom.'

Marriage, Divorce and Family

In 1925 she married her longtime friend Manuel Álvarez Bravo and moved to Oaxaca where Manuel was an accountant for the federal government and Lola produced her first photographs. They moved back to Mexico City and had a son, Manuel in 1927. Lola and Manuel Sr. had marital problems, separated in 1934, and finally divorced in 1948.

Career

Manuel had taken up photography as an adolescent; he taught Lola and they took pictures together in Oaxaca. Manuel also taught her to develop film and make prints in the darkroom. As he became more serious about pursuing a career in photography, she acted as his assistant, although she also harbored a desire to become a photographer in her own right. The Álvarez Bravos separated in 1934 but she decided to maintain the Alvarez Bravo name.

In the 1930s, just after her separation from Manuel, Álvarez Bravo worked as an elementary school art teacher and soon after took a position at the Department of Education cataloging photographs. She met the minister of education by chance and was asked to photograph him. He loved her work and showed her photographs to some influential people which got her a job in the mid-1930s as the chief photographer for El Maestro Rural (The Rural Teacher). El Maestro Rural was a magazine published by the secretary of public education aimed at the group of young teachers that were being hired by the progressive administration. She photographed schools, factories, farms, orphanages, fire stations, and hospitals throughout Mexico to go along with the magazine's articles. Álvarez Bravo is probably best known however for the photographs she took in the 1940s of her close friend, Frida Kahlo. In the image to the left, Álvarez Bravo depicts the pain Kahlo suffered after she was in a bus accident and in her relationship with Diego Rivera.

She was the director of photography at the National Institute of Fine Arts. She opened an art gallery in 1951 and was the first person to exhibit the work of Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. She also taught photography at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City.

Inspired by such photographers as Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, Álvarez Bravo established her own independent career. For 50 years, she photographed a wide variety of subjects, making documentary images of daily life in Mexico's villages and city streets and portraits of great leaders from various countries. She also experimented with photomontage.

She continued to take photographs until she went blind at seventy-nine. She made a statement late in life that sums up why her photographs are important; "If my photographs have any meaning, it's that they stand for a Mexico that once existed."

Legacy

Her work focused on documenting Mexico and its people during her lifetime, with a humanistic perspective. Her images document de industrialization of the country which occurred after the Mexican Revolution as well as the effects of 20th century technology.

She was the first woman photographer to exhibit her work at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana which the exhibit México en la vida, en la danza, en la muerte in 1953. She was accepted as a member of this institution.

The full archive of Lola Álvarez Bravo's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which also manages the copyright of her work.