Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Applying an intermedial and intercultural approach, this article analyses two essays about Mexico written by André Breton in 1938: “Frida Kahlo de Rivera” and “Memory of Mexico”. Both texts highlight a pictographic-scriptural surrealist practice that is explicitly designed to alter Breton’s own vision in order to perceive the world poetically, through inspiration and imagination.

Desde un enfoque tanto intermedial como intercultural, este artículo analiza dos ensayos que André Breton escribió en 1938 sobre México: “Recuerdo de México” y “Frida Kahlo de Rivera”. Ambos textos hacen hincapié en una práctica pictográfica-escritural surrealista que explícitamente quiere alterar la propia mirada para percibir el mundo a través de la inspiración y la imaginación.

Approaching Paz's reflections regarding the art of photography and the poems used to accompany two books of images I analyze in what way Paz's "confidence" on the use of vision as a form of knowledge is contra-posed to his "mistrust"  of language and its ultimate instrumentalization in Western Modernity.

This paper considers aspects of Peruvian surrealist poet César Moro through notions of the object and the document as these emerged from surrealism and ethnography, respectively, in the 1930s. Specifically, it looks at Moro’s poem “Pierre mère,” probably composed in 1941. Inherent in the figure of the stone Moro invokes, I suggest, lie surrealist notions of the object as something which breaks down or corrodes the autonomy of the material world, making palpable the interdependence of the world and the psyche, thus threatening the occidental logos, the Western order of things. But simultaneously the stone (a piece of Aztec sculpture) is an ethnographic document bearing witness in a particularly faithful way to cultural alterity. Moro’s poem opens onto a rich vein of inquiry into the “savage object,” the objet sauvage, and the use of artifacts and folk art in Latin American art and literature around 1940. By putting Moro’s poem into play against texts by Manual Álvarez Bravo and Benjamin Péret, it becomes clear that notions of the object and the document inform a range of depictions of archeological artifacts and folk-art objects by Latin American artists in the period.

Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide would emerge as one of the most celebrated Mexican female photographers of the twentieth century. She worked as assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo, once husband of Lola Alvarez Bravo after attending film school at the UNAM, enrolling at twenty-seven. In 1978, Iturbide would later photograph the Seri Indians of Sonora for the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico, published as “Those Who Live in the Sand / Los que Vivos en la arena” (1981).  The following year, Iturbide began a decade-long project with a Zapotec Indian community in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, upon invitation from the artist Francisco Toledo, culminating in the publication of her photographic book, Juchitán de las Mujeres. Notable among this collection of photographs was
Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, or “Our Lady of the Iguanas,” a gelatin silver photograph taken in 1979 that details the dignity, power and self-assured gaze of a defiant female Zapotec woman crowned by iguanas. The collection shows how female dominance over ritual and culture proved an anomaly in the matriarchal town of Juchitán, where a queer culture also flourished. The photograph, “Magnolia,” taken in 1986, depicted a man in a dress whose face is reflected in a hand-held mirror, one of the most overt expressions of queerness captured in Iturbide’s oeuvre. Although she did not define herself as one, Stanley Brandes referred to her an “innate anthropologist.” This paper will examine Iturbide’s work in the context of her emphasis upon female and feminine subjects in the Juchitán collection, including transvestitism and cross-dressing that help define a “third gender” known as muxhes. Graciela’s photographs of indigeneity and waywardly culture in Juchitán came to embody a subversive village poetic that ran countercurrent to depictions of female subjects in Mexico as subservient.

本稿は「マヌエル・アルバレス・ブラボ写真展―メキシコ、静かなる光と時」（世田谷美術館、2016年）にあわせて企画した、20世紀のメキシコ写真史に関するトークを採録したものである。解題として、アルバレス・ブラボに対する従来の評価のありようとその問題点を示し、展覧会およびトークを企画するに至った経緯を明らかにした。メキシコの写真史を通覧し得る日本語の文献がほぼ存在しない状況において、写真家の遺族およびメキシコの美術史・写真史研究者によるトーク採録は、今後に資するきわめて貴重な研究資料となるはずである。

Così anche nella fotografia: il bianco e nero è patentemente un’interpretazione della realtà, ma il colore troppo spesso, e purtroppo quasi sempre, è come se volesse essere una copia della realtà, senza avere la capacità di imprimere tutti, ma proprio tutti, i colori che i nostri occhi riescono a contemplare… Ancora non posso sapere quale sarà e quando sarà un’ultima epifania, ma credo che avvenga un’epifania continua, giorno per giorno, lo svelamento di un mistero che ci avvolge e ci penetra e continua a essere mistero per permetterci di continuare a essere uomini.