ART : For decades, Manuel Alvarez Bravo has been freezing moments of Mexican daily life. He has taken the time to find the poetry, often setting up his camera and waiting for the picture to happen. : Mexico’s Timekeeper

At 90, Mexico’s preeminent photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, still takes his Roliflex out to the countryside on an occasional Sunday afternoon to shoot landscapes. He continues to photograph nude women at Casa Azul, his colonial studio in the cobblestoned neighborhood of Coyoacan. He even steps out to shoot in the crowded streets of downtown from time to time.

But he has other primary pursuits. In the mornings, the maestro labors in his darkroom, reprinting his most renowned photographs from the 1920s and ‘30s to preserve them on tonally rich platinum paper. And in the afternoons, he organizes his massive book collection into something resembling a coherent library.

“I have trouble finding my books,” Alvarez Bravo said on the patio of his studio. “I am putting them into sections--photography, Mexican history, literature. But it is not a definitive arrangement.”

Looking at this white-haired gentleman in his 10th decade of life, one cannot help but wonder just when he plans to undertake the definitive organization of his library. The optimism in his statement is stunning, as if to say he has all the time in the world.

For nearly seven decades, Alvarez Bravo has taken timeless photographs of Mexico, 43 of which will be on display at the Getty Museum from Tuesday to Dec. 6.

The works in the exhibition are culled from the Getty’s recent acquisition of 53 images by the photographer. Many of the images were seen in a traveling retrospective organized in 1990 by the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, which was also seen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. But Alvarez Bravo told Getty curator Weston Naef that many of the works purchased by the museum are the only surviving prints of the images depicted.

All of the images at the Getty are from 1927-43, regarded as the classic period of Alvarez Bravo’s work. Included is a rare version of one of his most famous photographs, “Good Reputation Sleeping.” The 1939 image of a nude, bandaged woman lying on a blanket next to cactus buds was printed in triplicate for the catalogue cover of a Surrealist exhibition organized by Andre Breton in 1940. The Getty prints are the only known three-part form of this image.

Alvarez Bravo is considered the father of modern Mexican photography. He was the first, according to critic Raquel Tibol, who did not enter the field through photojournalism or picaresque landscapes. Unlike Agustin Casasola, for example, he did not photograph historic events.

Born in downtown Mexico City in 1902, Alvarez Bravo grew up in the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, went to school during the Mexican Revolution and took up photography in his 20s during the Mexican Renaissance.

He entered the art world through European expatriates, such as Surrealist movement founder Breton and photographers Hugo Brehme and Tina Modotti. Modotti introduced him to Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and, when she was expelled from the country, left him her camera and her job on the magazine Mexican Folkways, chronicling the works of Rivera and others.

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Alvarez Bravo’s home on a narrow street called Espiritu Santo (Holy Spirit) is a snapshot of Old Mexico stopped in time. Behind a stone wall, his front yard is savage, a mass of overgrown grass, fuchsia bougainvillea and enormous, rugged cacti. Stone steps lead down to a cave-like living room surrounded by a wall of lava rock and pre-Hispanic artifacts that seem to have been set there by the very Indians who crafted them hundreds of years ago.

Two parrots in their cages out back are visited regularly by a free bird whom Alvarez Bravo has named “Wild.” Across the street is his studio. A sign hanging in his darkroom for as long as anyone can remember says: “There is time. There is time.”

Alvarez Bravo’s sense of time is what first struck photographer Graciela Iturbide about the maestro when she began working as his assistant in 1969.

“We would go out to the countryside to take photographs. Many times he would pick a landscape, set up and wait for something to happen,” Iturbide said. “It was just him thinking and his camera there, waiting. What impressed me, what I most remember, is that he had time for everything. To read, to listen to music. He was on Mexican time. He was not in a hurry. He waited until he got what he wanted.”

And unlike Iturbide, an excellent and honored photographer in her own right, Alvarez Bravo would shoot only a few frames. “He didn’t take many. Only what he really wanted. He didn’t repeat--no four negatives of the same thing,” she said.

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Alvarez Bravo wears a gray shirt buttoned to his neck, a gray sweater and gray slacks. His jacket is cobalt blue like the wall of his studio. He combs his long white hair back from a lined forehead and tinted bifocals. His hands are white, delicate, spotted with age and probably chemicals.

The maestro is soft-spoken, clearly tired of answering the same questions so many, many times in 90 years. “Por sus obras los conoceras, “ he used to tell Iturbide in a biblical reference. “You will know them for their work.”

Nonetheless, there are a few points he still likes to make. A photographer’s work is the product “of a series of experiences in all aspects of life--of art, of daily life, of books and music and everything.”

For that reason, he says, he has been as influenced by Cervantes and Dostoevsky as by anything. Painting has influenced his work more than photography itself. Early in his career, he photographed the murals of Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo. “This taught me attitudes, the reality and technique of art . . . the personal selection of details. It gave me a concentration in different ways of seeing and thinking.”

Alvarez Bravo listens to music after lunch, choosing from a vast selection of records he has been collecting “since the days of Victrolas and 78s” and newer compact discs. He keeps classical music on while he works.

Iturbide calls him a Mexican “poet” rather than a photographer. “There is a Mexican essence in his work--work that is so excellent it is also universal.”

His Mexicanness is evident in the solitude of “Daydreaming,” a pensive girl with head in hand shot in 1931. Or in the exalted poverty of “Public Thirst,” a haloed boy drinking from a public fountain taken two years later.

“He freezes extraordinary moments of Mexican reality in a photographic image and converts them to poetry,” said Tibol, a longtime acquaintance of Bravo who writes for Proceso magazine.

“He takes a picture of a house, a sheet in the air, a cactus. It is not a public theme. It is a detail of life that is converted into a play of light and shadow that is not translatable into words. It is visual poetry,” she said.

In the preface to his book of photographs, “Mucho Sol,” Teresa del Conde quotes Alvarez Bravo as saying, “When a person is always attuned to reality, he finds in it everything that is fantastic.”

He also has said that he sought with his photographs to make visible the invisible. His works are replete with metaphors, a mixture of ancient myth and the modern world, dreams and reality. At first they seem frank. Then they lead to introspection and even to the subconscious. One such picture is “Striking Worker, Assassinated” taken in 1934. The dead man’s face and clothes are soaked with fresh blood and a glint in his eye recalls the duality of life and death. Indian gods figure heavily in his works and titles and one of his favorites is Coatlicue, who represents life and death intertwined.

Diego Rivera was one of those who encouraged Alvarez Bravo to get out into the countryside and to photograph common people. This now is his legacy to younger generations of photography--to take the time to look for the poetry in daily life.

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Alvarez Bravo said he has never grown bored with photography. “It is the only work I do. The only thing I know how to do.” His emphasis is on nudes now, largely because he can photograph them in his studio. Though still remarkably agile, it is harder for him to get around.

Does he see women differently today? The maestro shook his head.

“I don’t think the eye changes,” he said. “It is circumstances that are in an evolutionary process.”