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拍品专文
Bravo’s photographs articulate a tension rooted in his role as a 20th century luminary of modern photography as well as the sole representative of marginalized school of Latin artists. While Bravo operated within an artistic apparatus of Western traditions, he was driven and inspired by the theories and mythologies of Mexican culture.
The present suite embodies this poetic balance inadvertently but strikingly. The images Bravo has recorded are rendered with a cool, documentary distance – isolated as objects without any scene or frame of context. This dry, segregated presentation enlivens the artifacts – without the supplementary information required to understand their wider significance within ancient Aztec culture, one is prompted to focus more on the intricacies and details of the objects as works of craftsmanship.
The series parallels a more intentional series by the penultimate documentarian, Walker Evans: Beauties of the Common Tool, 1955. An unconventional series for Evans, Common Tools, isolates the objects of our everyday in a way that highlights the subtle grace and artistry hidden away in their simple forms and mechanisms: the tantalizing internal spiral of a wrench, the sinuous thumbhole of scissors. The Aztec artifacts that Bravo highlights in the present lot display a much different approach towards beauty through painstakingly carved stone that billow and weave. Snarling jaguars and skull-faced figures are removed from their supporting role of temple adornments and appropriated within a new arena of modern photography, a world where the boundaries between document and artwork are blurred – a realm full of anomalies and perfectly suited for Manuel Alvarez Bravo, an artist of many worlds.
The present suite embodies this poetic balance inadvertently but strikingly. The images Bravo has recorded are rendered with a cool, documentary distance – isolated as objects without any scene or frame of context. This dry, segregated presentation enlivens the artifacts – without the supplementary information required to understand their wider significance within ancient Aztec culture, one is prompted to focus more on the intricacies and details of the objects as works of craftsmanship.
The series parallels a more intentional series by the penultimate documentarian, Walker Evans: Beauties of the Common Tool, 1955. An unconventional series for Evans, Common Tools, isolates the objects of our everyday in a way that highlights the subtle grace and artistry hidden away in their simple forms and mechanisms: the tantalizing internal spiral of a wrench, the sinuous thumbhole of scissors. The Aztec artifacts that Bravo highlights in the present lot display a much different approach towards beauty through painstakingly carved stone that billow and weave. Snarling jaguars and skull-faced figures are removed from their supporting role of temple adornments and appropriated within a new arena of modern photography, a world where the boundaries between document and artwork are blurred – a realm full of anomalies and perfectly suited for Manuel Alvarez Bravo, an artist of many worlds.