CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/9/2016

Double Elephant 1973–74

"La Buena Fama Durmiendo" (1938-39) was reproduced in Manuel Álvarez Bravo's 1974 portfolio for Lee Friedlander and Burt Wolf's Double Elephant Press, all issues of which are now collected in a deluxe, boxed edition from Steidl. What Álvarez Bravo accomplished, according to André Breton, was "to make the full range of Mexican pathos—all its many moving and touching facets—fully understandable to us; any place that Álvarez Bravo has stopped to aim his camera, whenever he has paused to record a play of light, a gesture, some absolutely distinctive moment, or a silence, not only do we know that there lies the breathing heart of Mexico but that it is in such moments and at such places that the artist has been able to have a presentiment—in an act of unique discretion—of the fully objective value of his emotion." Image © Colette Urbajtel/Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo S.C.