Lola Alvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era

Lola was extraordinary as a woman and as an artist. She maintained close friendships with a large group of intellectuals, writers, poets, and playwrights who included Salvador Novo, Elias Nandino, and Diego de Mesa. She was also part of a dynamic circle of visual artists who included her husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, as well as Maria Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. In addition to the photographs she took out personal aesthetic motives, she produced countless works on commission for various private and governmental entities. The one hundred photographs presented in this book belong to the Gonzalez Rendon archive. They represent only a small selection of its incredibly varied riches. These photographs throw new light on Lola's working methods and provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of her career. They also reveal her interest in surrealism and the avant-garde technique of photomontage, as well as her mastery of various genres, from the portraits of famous intellectuals and close friends to the documentary images of urban and rural poverty in Mexico. Accompanying the photographs in this volume are essays by curators Adriana Zavala and Rachael Arauz and by James Oles, a specialist in Latin American art. Other scholars and photography specialists who have contributed to the volume are Dina Comisarenco, Karen Cordero, Deborah Dorotinsky, Ana Garduno, Carolina Gonzalez, Cecilia Olivares, Cristobal Jacome, Johanna Spanke, and Javier Vazquez.