Monica Bravo - Böcker

An engaging investigation of how the relationships between four U.S. photographers and Mexican artists forged new developments in modernism  Photographers Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Helen Levitt were among the U.S. artists who traveled to Mexico during the interwar period seeking a community more receptive to the radical premises of modern art. Looking closely at the work produced by these four artists in Mexico, this book examines the vital role of exchanges between the expatriates and their Mexican contemporaries in forging a new photographic style. Monica Bravo offers fresh insights concerning Weston’s friendship with Diego Rivera; Modotti’s images of labor, which she published alongside the writings of the Stridentists; Strand’s engagement with folk themes and the work of composer Carlos Chávez; and the influence of Manuel Álvarez Bravo on Levitt’s contributions to a New World surrealism. Exploring how these dialogues resulted in a distinct kind of modernism characterized by inter-American interests, the book reveals the ways in which cross-border collaboration shaped a new “greater American” aesthetic.

Published to accompany a major touring exhibition, this is the most comprehensive survey to date of the groundbreaking American photographer Helen Levitt. Over six decades, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) explored the streets of her native New York with a handheld camera. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she found inspiration in the theatre and spontaneity of the street, capturing everyday moments in urban life and forging a distinct visual language from her private observations. Exuding a keen warmth and sensitivity for human gesture and movement, her photographs capture, in James Agee’s words, the ‘pure spontaneity of true folk art’. Accompanying a major touring exhibition of Levitt’s work, the first of its kind to draw from her complete archive, this ambitious publication showcases her entire output. It not only includes her best-known photographs, but also features rarely seen early works from her first year using a Leica and all fifty works from the original edit of her classic 1965 photobook A Way of Seeing, with record prints preserved by Levitt herself. Essays by a range of scholars and specialists hone in on key thematic, technical and biographical aspects of Levitt’s life and work, including an examination of the photos she took during her trip to Mexico in 1941, her innovative use of colour in the 1950s and her late work from the 1980s, providing an authoritative insight into one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.