Image: Academy Art Museum, Easton
Monica Bravo will present ‘Beyond Origins, Across Borders: Modernist Photography in Mexico’ at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, on August 28 at 6 p.m. The free lecture will examine Mexico City’s photographic culture in the 1920s and 1930s, while questioning conventional accounts that organize Mexican modernist photography around artistic “firsts” and straightforward lines of influence.
Bravo’s talk accompanies ‘Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography,’ the Academy Art Museum’s summer exhibition, which runs through October 11. Presented in the Lederer Gallery, the exhibition brings together more than 50 vintage photographs made during a period of sustained artistic exchange between the United States and Mexico. The exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions, with works drawn from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.
The lecture will address the cosmopolitan character of Mexico City after the Mexican Revolution, when artists and photographers from different countries gathered in the city and exchanged ideas, equipment and techniques. Its subjects will include Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, whose work in Mexico has often served as the starting point for histories of Mexican modernist photography, as well as Manuel Álvarez Bravo and later generations shaped by the circulation of photographs through exhibitions and journals.
Rather than treating those relationships as a fixed lineage, Bravo will consider the conditions that made Mexican audiences receptive to modernist photography and the ways the country’s cultural revolution encouraged new photographic practices. The museum describes the lecture as an examination of the “intermedial construction” of Mexico’s revolution in modernist photography, extending the story beyond national and artistic origins.
The exhibition provides examples of the history under discussion, including Weston’s ‘Chayotes’ (1924), Tina Modotti’s ‘Bandolier, Corn, Sickle’ (1927), Álvarez Bravo’s ‘La siesta de los peregrinos’ (‘The Rest of the Migrants’) from the 1930s, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Calle Cuauhtemoctzín, Mexico City’ (1934), and Helen Levitt’s ‘Mexico City’ (1941). The museum’s account of the exhibition emphasizes both international artistic exchange and the development of a distinct visual language by Mexican photographers.
Bravo is assistant professor of the history and theory of photography in Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology. She is the author of ‘Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico,’ published by Yale University Press in 2021 and shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. A book signing will follow the lecture, with copies available for purchase in the Academy Art Museum Store. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required because space is limited.
