Life’s Everyday Mysteries

“Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” celebrates the renowned photographer’s 100th birthday (on Feb. 4, 2002) by bringing together nearly 100 of his best photographs. Birthday parties are hardly the occasion for scholarship, groundbreaking or otherwise, and the crowd-pleasing show at the Getty Center sticks to the highlights: More than three-quarters of its images are from the 1930s and ‘40s, when Alvarez Bravo was making his most influential works.

In the visual arts, influence is usually measured in terms of an artist’s effect upon other artists. Creating a style that lesser talents are compelled to imitate locates one on the cutting edge, where extremes are often embraced to keep the competition from catching up. Shocked and scandalized, viewers generally fall by the wayside.

In contrast, Alvarez Bravo’s photographs depict everyday dramas that almost anyone can understand. Even if you’ve never seen one of his stunningly intimate images, visiting the exhibition makes you feel as if you’re on familiar ground. This is because his influence reaches well beyond art, shaping the way people from all walks of life see the world we live in.

A 20th century master of black-and-white imagery, Alvarez Bravo is to Mexican photography what Walker Evans is to American: an artist whose powerful vision so vividly embodies so much of his country’s ethos and outlook that it’s impossible to know where the facts end and the myth-making begins. Where Evans (1903-1975) specialized in plain pictures of anonymous people and hardscrabble places stripped of all romance, Alvarez Bravo focuses on moments when similar subjects are pregnant with mystery, shot through with enough bittersweet meaning to make all but the hardhearted cry.

The exhibition, which was organized by guest curator Roberto Tejada, who teaches art theory at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Getty curatorial assistant Mikka Gee Conway, begins in a small gallery, where four photographs by Alvarez Bravo are hung alongside a dozen by his contemporaries Tina Modotti, Paul Strand and Edward Weston. All three worked in Mexico in the 1920s and ‘30s, having been drawn there by the creative ferment and political idealism that followed its 10-year revolution. The directness with which the Americans approached the mundane subjects of their photographs influenced Alvarez Bravo, who learned from them before quickly going on to add his own personal touches to their crisp, unsentimental objectivity.

His wide-ranging vision unfolds in three large galleries, where his works have been arranged in loose chronological order. In nearly all of his gelatin silver prints, none of which is bigger than an ordinary piece of notebook paper, there’s more to the picture than meets the eye.

The first image inside the main entrance is the one from which the show’s title is taken. “Optical Parable” (1931) depicts the facade of an optometrist’s shop in Mexico City, seen from the perspective of someone walking down the sidewalk. Having aimed his camera upward and at an oblique angle to the building, Alvarez Bravo creates the impression that you’re looking over your shoulder, up at the sky and out of the corner of your eye. This suggests that what you see in the photograph is just one of the many incidental scenes that slide through your peripheral vision as you pass by, preoccupied by whatever might be on your mind.

But he has printed the negative backward, reversing the words on the shop’s signs and windows. Rather than creating confusion, this little gesture is in deep harmony with the experience of being a pedestrian, of catching fleeting reflections on translucent surfaces, of looking through things while looking at them. It also reflects the photographer’s desire to turn the world around, to get inside your head and stir up some of the memories stored there. It’s no accident that the shop’s proprietor, whose job is to improve his customers’ eyesight, is named E. Spirito. The combination of modern science and old-fashioned soulfulness is a constant in the work of Alvarez Bravo.

In many images, he takes viewers beyond superficial appearances by hiding the eyes of his subjects and presenting people lost in reverie. Depicting a lithe girl who leans on a balcony’s railing as she is enwrapped in her own fantasies, “Daydreaming” (1931) is a masterpiece of compositional gracefulness and emotional tenderness. In “Portrait of the Eternal” (1935), a shaft of bright light illuminates only half of Isabel Villasenor’s face, shrouding her eyes in dark shadows and endowing her pose with mysterious portent.

The division between inner and outer worlds resonates against the division between the haves and have-nots in “Tehuana Woman Combing Isabel’s Hair” (1935). Here, longing for the niceties of privilege collides with the knowledge of their inaccessibility, charging the simple scenario with barely contained volatility.

Something similar transpires in “Daughter of the Dancers” (1933), which shows the back of a barefoot woman standing on tiptoe to peer through a round window in a wall on which a checkerboard pattern has been painted. The position of her body echoes the posture of the photographer, who looked through a circular lens to make the picture. It also mirrors that of each viewer, linking us to the artist in our desire to make sense of what we can see on this side of the wall and what we can only imagine beyond it.

When Alvarez Bravo turns his attention to men, things get more blunt. Shot from the street, where the midday sun glares, “The Crouched Ones” (1934) shows five working-class men seated at the bar of a comedor. The deep shadow cast by the cheap eatery’s rollup door cuts off their heads, a symbolic decapitation that has more to do with the spirit of their activity than its literal truthfulness. Like ostriches, they appear to be burying their heads in the sand, grabbing a few mouthfuls of respite before getting back to work.

Two other pictures of men in the street intensify the disjuncture between bodies and consciousness. In one, a man lies on his side under a striped blanket. Curled into the fetal position, he is dead to the world. In the next one, a striking worker who has been fatally shot lies on his back in a puddle of blood. Tragedy and dignity fuse in this point-blank picture, which, despite its brutality, leaves much to the imagination.

Graves and mud-brick walls, with no doors or windows, are subjects to which Alvarez Bravo often returns. His attentively composed images of objects that hide as much as they reveal attest to his conviction that our eyes take us only so far. To go further requires the help of metaphors and symbols, which he provides in almost all of his works, especially those that dabble in a gentlemanly sort of Surrealism. A visual poet whose accessible images are not exhausted by what can be said about them, Alvarez Bravo redeems the mundane world by making its silent melancholy sing.

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“Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Optical Parables,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7360, through Feb. 17. Closed Mondays. Free. Parking reservations required weekdays, $5.