Lecture: Monica Bravo | Past Origins, Throughout Borders: Modernist Photography in Mexico

Mexico City of the Twenties and ‘30s was a vibrant cosmopolitan artistic center, drawing modernists from all over the world, including photographers from the United States. Histories of Mexican modernist photography often paradoxically begin with the Californian Edward Weston and Italian-born Tina Modotti, and the photographs they made in 1920s Mexico. Scholars assert these artists’ affect on Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who turned Mexico’s pre-eminent photographer of the 20 th century. In flip, examples of Álvarez Bravo’s surrealist work circulated by means of exhibitions and journals, each at house and throughout borders, to affect one other era of artists. Rather than insist on photographic firsts and reify lineage, this discuss considers the situations that made Mexican audiences receptive to the modernist photographic aesthetic within the first place. It additionally examines the cultural revolution that impressed new photographic practices to develop inside Mexico. In so doing, speaker Monica Bravo demonstrates the intermedial development of Mexico’s revolution in modernist images, past origins and throughout borders. The lecture shall be adopted by a ebook signing of, “Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico,” which shall be out there for buy within the AAM Store.

Monica Bravo is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Photography within the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the creator of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, printed by Yale University Press in June 2021. It was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her subsequent ebook, “Silver Pacific: Early Western American Photography and its Mining Economy,” is underneath advance contract with Princeton University Press and has been supported by quite a few fellowships. Her publications have appeared within the journals American Art, Art Bulletin, Art History, Art Journal, History of Photography, Modernism / modernity Print Plus, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, amongst different venues. Prior to Princeton, Bravo taught at Yale University, California College of the Arts, and the University of Southern California. She was the inaugural co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society.

Image: Sameer Khan