ART REVIEW : Deciphering the Images of Alvarez Bravo : Photography: The Mexican artist layers his works with sensuality, politics and life and death. A retrospective of 113 black-and-white pictures is on display in Balboa Park.

The striking beauty of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s photographs makes them irresistible from the very first glance.

But their mysterious content is what keeps you looking.

“Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Alvarez Bravo,” a retrospective of 113 black-and-white photographs, opened last week at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park and continues through Sept. 9. The show validates once more the 88-year-old Mexican artist’s reputation as one of the greatest photographers of this century.

Organized by Arthur Ollman, the museum’s executive director, along with Nissan Perez, curator of photographs at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, this exhibition is more than just a survey of Alvarez Bravo’s work since the 1920s. It also is a reminder that sensuality and political content can easily coexist in a single image, that matters of life and death can be treated simultaneously with humor and pathos, and that a single work of art is capable of expressing vast numbers of layered meanings.

“Public Thirst,” for example, a work from 1933, shows a young boy crouching on a ledge to drink from an outdoor water fountain. It’s an everyday image, hardly a grand statement. From his bearing, you get the feeling that the child is a resourceful character, but still, he’s just an ordinary boy, barefooted yet well-dressed in wrinkled but clean white slacks and shirt. And Alvarez Bravo doesn’t succumb to the pitfalls of cute

ness that ruin so many pictures of children--the boy’s head is turned away, he is anonymous.

The work’s title indicates that there’s more to this image than the kind of ordinary incident that has preoccupied photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example. This boy, whose dark skin identifies him as a native Mexican, is one of Alvarez Bravo’s symbols for the Mexican people. And yet, as Perez points out in his essay in the catalogue for the show, the boy also represents young Mayan boys who once were sacrificed to quench the thirst of their gods. To make the connection between life and death, sacrifice and nourishment, the artist always pairs this work with a bloody image titled “Striking worker, assassinated,” from 1934; in the latter a teen-age boy lies dead in the street, a victim and martyr whose face is stained by a fountain of blood that flows from his wounds. There is a parallel between the flow of the water and the flow of the blood. The ancient martyrdom of Mayan males is equated with the image of a contemporary political martyr. Youth is not a safe time, Alvarez Bravo seems to say.

Alvarez Bravo’s style is rooted both in Mexican history--with its pre-Columbian and Spanish mix of religious and pagan symbols--and in European art history, particularly surrealism. But, generally, he doesn’t divide his focus in one direction or the other. Modern and ancient, mundane and sacred blend gracefully.

Sometimes, the iconography seems somewhat obvious, though it’s never simple. “Coatlicue,” 1987, pairs two sculptures in a bed of wild flowers. The first, a small pre-Columbian fertility sculpture of a woman, nestles the second, a folk art plaster skeleton in its arms. It is a pose that alludes to, and perhaps even mocks, the iconic Christian image of Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms. Alvarez Bravo’s skeleton is like those commonly used on the Mexican Day of the Dead holy day to symbolize the return to earth of dead relatives. It is also just one of the many signs indicating Mexican culture’s blending of Christian ritual and Mayan beliefs.

Usually, though, Alvarez Bravo’s meanings are tough to decipher. More often than not, hints of deeper meaning are suggested only cryptically through titles. And the titles can be poetic, but still illegible to those who don’t know much about Mexican culture, which is why the explanatory wall texts provided are so important and helpful in this exhibition.

“The Daughter of Dancers,” for example, is a picture of a woman in traditional Mexican dress looking through a round window in a decorative brick wall; she stands in an odd posture, on her toes with one foot on top of the other. Perez explains that the title refers not only to dancers, but also to a kind of Mexican architectural carving, and that the woman is meant to be both an archetypal Mexican woman, and a reference to an indigenous Mexican art form.

More often than not Alvarez Bravo’s photographs are composed with a strong central image, so that the eye is drawn first to the abstract qualities of the compositions. He is a master at using light and dark passages to highlight his sense of mystery and draw out the sculptural qualities in his subjects. A portrait of Carlos Fuentes, for example, shows the figure’s face half obscured by shadow.

There are obvious debts in this work. For example, many of Alvarez Bravo’s nudes where he shows just the female torso are clearly reminiscent of Edward Weston’s work. And his experiments with X-rays represented by two images here owe much to the surrealist Man Ray. But despite such clear references, Alvarez Bravo adds his own flavor. His voluptuous subjects look like primitive fertility figures, not classical nudes, for example. His X-ray pictures are spiced with black humor.

What remains surprising in a show spanning six decades of work is the consistency of the artist’s interests and stylistic devices throughout. Happily, Alvarez Bravo’s peculiar mix of patriotism and humor, mythology and life, has changed very little over the years. Alvarez Bravo knows how to provoke. And he knows how to please the eye.

He’s done both well for a very long time. After closing in San Diego, the exhibition travels on a two-year national tour to San Francisco, Detroit, Kansas City, Kan., Santa Barbara, Haverford, Pa., Coral Gables, Fla., and Cambridge, Mass.