Last chance to see Manuel Alvarez Bravo at MoMA

Much more than a cursory celebration of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s ninety-fifth birthday, this show at the Museum of Modern Art (until 18 May) is a monumental retrospective of the work of the profoundly original Mexican photographer who entitled his best known picture–an image of a young girl napping naked in the sun–“Good reputation sleeping”. Alvarez Bravo knew, photographed and worked with André Breton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sergei Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros, Paul Strand, Leon Trotsky and Edward Weston. His vision remains unique while he matched his contemporaries in stature. Be prepared for an encyclopaedic show, tracing each strand of thought by one of the greatest visual philosophers-cum-photographers ever. Cosmopolitan in outlook, but blessed with the bright light of his native Mexico, he lives amidst an exotic cornucopia of potent images, using his camera to transmute the real into the surreal. Bravo’s identification with mestizo Indian and Spanish hybrid culture allows his educated eye to mythologise the mundane. His subjects are timeless, imbued with the magic realism of a siesta dream. His landscape is peopled with desire, his lens objectifying obsessions into images of sex, dreams and inevitably death. Not to be missed!