Out of the shoe box

On the wall of his studio darkroom in Mexico City, Manuel Alvarez Bravo posted a scrap of paper on which he’d scrawled “Hay Tiempo.” “There is time.”

In 2002, time ran out for Alvarez Bravo, who died at age 100. But by then, with photographs recasting everyday Mexican City street life as lyrical dreamscapes, he had created a celebrated body of work rooted in Mexico’s post-revolution artistic renaissance that flourished in the 1930s.

At 95, Alvarez Bravo, slowed by ill health, revisited a lifetime’s worth of themes, sifting through shoe boxes crammed with neglected proof sheets and negatives that had accumulated in his studio over the last 60 years, work he’d shunted aside in his perpetual push to produce something new. A selection of these previously unpublished pictures form the core of “Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Ojos en los Ojos, The Eyes in His Eyes” on display at Rose Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station.

Gallery owner Rose Shoshana, who befriended Alvarez Bravo and his wife, Colette Alvarez-Urbajtel, in the early ‘90s, sparked the project. “I wanted to give him a project to look forward to” after he was hospitalized in 1997, she says. “Going through some boxes of old proofs and negatives I came across images I’d never seen before and came up with the idea of doing a show focusing on more abstract pieces. Don Manuel did not like to look back, but this opportunity was sort of imposed on him to look at work he hadn’t done anything with and see it with new eyes.”

The archive finds featured in “Eyes” include an eerie group portrait of masked surgeons that evokes a Dutch Masters painting, a storefront stocked with columns of fedoras.

What do the images signify? Alvarez Bravo was not eager to explain. “He wanted to hear your take rather than tell you what he thought the work was about,” Shoshana says.

The artist did assert exacting controls over which prints made the cut. “Many times, I’d ask for certain images, Colette would have prints made. We’d go into don Manuel’s room to show him and he’d say, ‘This isn’t the way it’s meant to look.’ They would be torn up and we’d try again. He was very specific about what he liked.”

The project yielded surprising finds, says Guillermo Sheridan, who wrote an essay for the show’s companion catalog. He mentions “Cacahuates,” circa 1980, which arrays a grid of peanuts against a black piece of paper. “Nothing could be more simple,” he says. “But suddenly these objects seem infused with mystery and affirmation. Bravo had a gift for interacting with the most commonplace things and turn them into something magical.”

-- Hugh Hart