Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photopoetry

Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor

This month, Chronicle Books pays homage to two luminaries of international photography with stunning and beautifully produced artist monographs. Manuel Alvarez Bravo was the most significant figure in the history of Mexican photography and one of the foremost practitioners of visual arts in the twentieth century. For thirty years, world-renowned photographer Linda Connor has captured sites of mystery and contemplation from around the world. Together, their work is haunting and sublime, intimate and epic, powerful and poetic.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) picked up a camera in 1923, unaware that he would go on to become Mexico's most celebrated photographer. Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photopoetry, the first major retrospective of his eighty-year career, showcases hundreds of iconic photographs and unveils more than twenty previously unpublished images. Strikingly lyrical and richly resonant, the collection includes celebrated and iconic images as well as undiscovered masterpieces. The work encompasses landscapes, urban and rural scenes, nudes, still-lifes, and religious and vernacular subjects, as well as portraits of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others. Above all, Alvarez Bravo's work celebrated his love for Mexico—its moder n landscape as well as its age-old indigenous rituals.

Three illuminating essays reveal the poetry of Bravo's photographs—from his use of light and form to his fascination with dreams and his preoccupation with death. This definitive monograph is a powerful tribute to Mexico's most distinguished photographer.

In Linda Connor's photographs, even the humblest subjects assume a visual radiance. From the clarity of her portraits and landscapes to her sunlight printing technique, Connor's body of work evokes a sense of otherworldly serenity. Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, a career-spanning retrospective, perfectly marries large format photographs from her extensive travels with prints she has created from nineteenth and early twentieth-century astronomical glass plates from the Lick Observatory. Contextualized by an unprecedented three-way conversation between Linda and two modern luminaries, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin, these intriguing subjects juxtapose the spiritual with the scientific and inspire our sense of wonder.

Connor's work is infused with curiosity and passion. Honoring her subjects she provides iconic glimpses beyond the world of physical appearance. With their complex interplay of light and shadow, the physical and ethereal, the elegant images within this monograph present an extensive selection from this intrepid photographer's body of work. Published to coincide with a major touring exhibition, Odyssey is a long overdue celebration of a modern photographic master.

View the photographs of Alvarez Bravo and Connor online, and don't forget to check the Chronicle Books Blog every Friday for the latest news in Art & Design.

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