Mexico City of the 1920s 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’ influence on Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who became Mexico’s pre-eminent photographer of the twentieth century. In turn, examples of Álvarez Bravo’s surrealist work circulated through exhibitions and journals, both at home and across borders, to influence another generation of artists. Rather than insist on photographic firsts and reify lineage, this talk considers the conditions that made Mexican audiences receptive to the modernist photographic aesthetic in the first place. It also examines the cultural revolution that inspired new photographic practices to develop within Mexico. In so doing, speaker Monica Bravo demonstrates the intermedial construction of Mexico’s revolution in modernist photography, beyond origins and across borders. The lecture will be followed by a book signing of, “Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico,” which will be available for purchase in the AAM Store.

Monica Bravo is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Photography in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, published by Yale University Press in June 2021. It was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her next book, “Silver Pacific: Early Western American Photography and its Mining Economy,” is under advance contract with Princeton University Press and has been supported by numerous fellowships. Her publications have appeared in 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, among other 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.

This event is FREE and open to the public, but space is limited so please register here, REGISTER

Image Credit: Sameer Khan