Manuel Alvarez Bravo : photopoetry /

This major retrospective documents and celebrates the work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the most significant force in Mexican photography and one of the foremost visual arts practitioners of the twentieth century.

Over 370 tritone photographs mark Alvarez Bravo's remarkable eighty-year career. Strikingly poetic and richly resonant, the collection includes iconic images as well as over thirty previously unpublished masterpieces. Urban and rural scenes, still lifes, nudes, religious and vernacular subjects, portraits of luminaries including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz: all illustrate the peerless acuity of the photographer's eye. Above all, Alvarez Bravo's work celebrates his beloved Mexico, with its indigenous rituals and age-old customs.

Complete with a preface by Alvarez Bravo's widow Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, illuminating essays by internationally renowned writers John Banville, Jean-Claude Lemagny and Carlos Fuentes, as well as a full chronology and bibliography, this is the definitive monograph on a true master of modern photography.