La Jornada: Octavio Paz and Manuel Álvarez Bravo inspire exhibition in the US

The exhibition Instant/revelation: Moments in Mexican photographywhich will open on September 1 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, United States, traces the history of photography in Mexico, between 1920 and 2010, through the selection of works by 13 national photographers.

The exhibition takes up images of Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993), Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989), Antonio Reynoso (1919-1996), Héctor García (1923-2012), Mariana Yampolsky (1925-2002), Rodrigo Moya (1934-2025), Pedro Meyer (1935), Graciela Iturbide (1942), Yolanda Andrade (1950), Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (1952), Cecilia Salcedo Méndez (1957) and Flor Garduño (1957), who have recorded the transformations of the social history and the photographic scene of Mexico throughout the last century.

“Instant/revelation traces the creative connections between generations of photographers, whose images offer a deep insight into the cultural life of Mexico, while demonstrating the power of artistic exchange to shape our vision of the world,” said Timothy Potts, director of the US venue.

For her part, Julieta Pestarino, curator of the exhibition, explained that the pieces that comprise the exhibition, taken over almost a hundred years, bear witness to the “close collaboration” of photographers with artists, writers, filmmakers and even with anthropologists.

The exhibition takes its name and conceptual framework from the book Moment and revelation (1982), by Octavio Paz, with images by Álvarez Bravo. Inspired by the Nobel Prize winner’s poetic reflections on the photographer’s pieces, the exhibition will be organized into five thematic sections titled some verses from the poem. Face to time.

The identical and the different explores the relationships between the photographers, as many of them were friends, teachers and students or co-workers. While each artist developed their own style, they often addressed similar themes forged by a common cultural and artistic environment. Sensation and perception Taking as its starting point the first photos of Manuel Álvarez Bravo from the late 1920s, this section analyzes the capacity that photography developed throughout the 20th century to transform the ordinary through various resources such as cropping, displacement or changing context.

Revelations lensthe third section, presents photographs that turn moments of daily life into poetic and mysterious images. This approach, which characterized the work of Álvarez Bravo, is also present in the work of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño and Yolanda Andrade. This thematic core also includes periodical publications such as Image, The Rural Teacher y Mexican Art and Lifein which many pieces were disseminated.

The eye thinks, the thought sees reviews, through portraits and shared creative networks, the relationships between Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Paz and Juan Rulfo. The last section, Time does not stop flowingtakes up images ranging from the 1930s to 2014. This section explores how the main social, political and economic changes of its time were documented, from the Mexican Miracle, in the mid-20th century, to the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa in 2014.

The exhibition will be available until next January 2.