Álvarez Bravo, Catany and Strand bring Mexico to Mallorca

Llucmajor“This is pure Mexico.” So says Aurelia Álvarez Urbajtel, daughter of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, as she walks through the rooms of the Toni Catany Foundation (FTC) in Llucmajor, where Cuerpos, almas, calles has just been inaugurated, a selection of more than a hundred photographs by the man considered one of the great representatives of 20th-century Mexican photography. She says this in front of images that, rather than explaining Mexico, seem to contain it: the people of the streets, the bodies, the faces, the religion, the death, the symbols, and the silences. “They seem like very simple photos, but they have a lot of mystery,” notes the curator of the exhibition, Horacio Fernández.

But Aurelia Álvarez’s phrase could also serve to summarize what is happening these days in Llucmajor. The FTC has opened its doors wide to Mexico with Mexicana, a set of exhibitions and activities that for six months, until April 30th, bring into dialogue the gazes of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Toni Catany, and Paul Strand. Three photographers and three ways of approaching a country that becomes here something more than just a place to portray.

The general title, Mexicana, refers to the book that René d’Harnoncourt published in 1931, a work—present in the exhibition—which, with texts and drawings, also sought to bring the reader closer to the country through its people, landscapes, houses, churches, trades, and ways of life. At the FTC, the journey is now photographic, with the particularity that part of the route passes through the gaze of a Mallorcan, Toni Catany. He traveled to Mexico twice. The first time, in 1996, took him to the Yucatan Peninsula, with Merida and Tulum as bases for exploring Mayan sites. In 2008, he returned and created a series of images marked by the influence of one of his admired photographers, Paul Strand. Now, for the first time, Catany's Mexican photographs are brought together with The Mexican Portfolio by Strand, a portfolio of twenty photos that is part of the FTC collection and which the photographer from Llucmajor had incorporated into his universe of references.

“What to photograph in Mexico? I would like to take portraits, above all,” wrote Catany before one of his trips. He also thought about the markets, the houses, the landscapes, and the ruins. “Every trip is an unknown: what will I find there?” he noted. Some of those photographs were later published in self-published books such as Mèxic 2008 and El bes de Judes.

The people, the streets, the symbols, but also the editing and especially the care for the photographic techniques worked on in the studio itself bring Catany closer to Álvarez Bravo. In Catany’s Mexico exhibition, one can see, among others, platinum and palladium prints. And in the Álvarez Bravo exhibition, there are also platinum and palladium prints, made in his studio, some of which have rarely been exhibited. It is not just the image, therefore, but also the way of materializing it. By the way, the Mexican’s daughter recalls that in the studio there was a sign that the photographer kept well in mind and that summarized well that way of working and remembering how to face life: “Hay tiempo, hay tiempo,” he would repeat to himself.

A phrase made of photographs

Manuel Álvarez Bravo thought that every photograph was like a word within a sentence. Each image expressed only a part of it, and it was when it was joined with others that it acquired a new dimension. This idea is almost a declaration of intent in Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Cuerpos, almas, calles, an exhibition that Horacio Fernández has built with more than 100 photographs from the photographer's own archives that cover his entire trajectory, the purely Mexican one.

Álvarez Bravo lived through practically the entire Mexican 20th century. He was born in 1902 and died in 2002, and his work spans from the late twenties to the nineties. He therefore lived through the Mexico that followed the Revolution and that period of transformation known as the Mexican Renaissance, in which the desire for modernization coexisted with the search for an identity of its own. He was one of the witnesses and, at the same time, one of the creators of this new imaginary. “He was a man very much of Mexico and very much of the Mexican 20th century,” explains his daughter: “He lived through the post-revolutionary era and participated in the construction of a new Mexico that embraced tradition but opened itself up to contemporaneity.”

This tension between tradition and modernity appears in his photographs. Álvarez Bravo was a street photographer. He was not interested in empty streets or architectures devoid of life, notes Horacio Fernández. What he looked for were the people: walking, lying down, alone, in pairs, in motion. “The people walking fascinated him, as did those who were lying on the street; the theater of the street,” recalls Aurelia Álvarez. La hija de los danzantes, Los agachados, El ensueño, Muchacha viendo pájaros and Las estaciones/La muchacha del tren are some of the best-known images of the journey. But there are many others less seen and some that are presented as unpublished. The collection allows us to see how that apparently calm gaze went on to build a photography that was also everyday and strange. “Don Manuel seemed like a calm person, but he had a volcano inside,” says his daughter.

Social concern is also part of this inner volcano. “Don Manuel used to say: ‘all my photos have social content’,” explains his daughter: “He had political consciousness, even though he never joined the Communist Party. He was, however, part of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR) and was in contact with some of the main artists and intellectuals of the Mexico of his time. But he didn't like social life very much.” In the exhibition there is a series of portraits that allows us to reconstruct his network of relationships: Juan Rulfo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many others appear before his camera. They are portraits that do not function only as an inventory of illustrious names, but also explain the culture that interested the photographer.

But if there are two themes that especially run through the exhibition, they are death and religion. Horacio Fernández stops in front of the photograph of a flowered grave and in front of other images in which nature, crosses, skulls, and the forms of vanitas turn the landscape into a symbol. Death, in the universe of Álvarez Bravo, is not necessarily tragic. “Death is born with every new life,” he used to say.

Aurelia Álvarez explains that the familiarity with religious iconography was part of his original environment. “He came from a deeply Catholic family. He wasn't, but I believe that deep down he was a little bit.” She explains this in front of the photograph La tercera caída. In any case, the exhibition does not try to turn the images into a lesson about Mexico. And this is also one of the features that Horacio Fernández highlights about the photography of Álvarez Bravo: it avoids easy morality and explicit denunciation. There is emotion, but not sentimentality.

The poem by Octavio Paz

The idea of a photograph that acquires a new meaning when related to other images is so decisive that it justifies dedicating the largest area of the exhibition to the book that Álvarez Bravo made with Octavio Paz. The photographs dialogue with the poem that the poet dedicated to the photographer, image by image, verse by verse. In the exhibition, the poem is read from left to right and each verse is associated with a photograph. The text, therefore, is not a simple complement to the images: it marks the journey, accompanies the gaze, and provides context.

Over the next six months, Mexico thus occupies the FTC. Not as a single gaze, but as a constellation. Álvarez Bravo contributes the country experienced and photographed for more than half a century; Strand, the gaze of a North American fascinated by the people and forms of Mexican culture; and Catany, that of a Majorcan who arrived as a traveler, but who already carried the photographs of other photographers in his memory.

Mexicana has parallel activities that complete this look at the country and its culture. The next one, on October 16, with the concert Cuerpos sonoros, almas detenidas, a musical project by Manuel Sol Mateo, grandson of Álvarez Bravo, which will tour the Mexico of the 20th century through voice and guitar. Just as his grandfather did with the camera.