Bravo, Indeed

At the Belger Arts Center, the world has just grown smaller.

The center’s director, Mo Dickens, is curious by nature, and one Saturday afternoon he had an hour to kill. He spent it at the Kansas City Art Institute gallery, where he happened to run into Art Institute President Kathleen Collins, who was in touch with a woman named Colette Alvarez Urbajtel — the second wife and widow of preeminent Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. As a result, the Belger’s exhibit of Bravo’s singular, visionary and sensitive work practically fell into Dickens’ lap. “It was almost too smooth,” he says of the circumstances.

Which is lucky for us. These 50 black-and-white photos from the 1920s through the 1940s, considered Bravo’s “early work,” reveal a gifted artist behind the camera. Bravo proves adept at revealing personal aspects of his subjects. He delights in juxtapositions and explores apparent contradictions in the world. His work is romantic without being sentimental, tragic while still beautiful, realistic but with a sense of mystery. It’s as immediate as it is emotional.

One could argue that a voice is present here. When photography is done right, Bravo told American Photographer in 1980, “Each photograph is like a word or a sentence in a book. Together they make up a type of dictionary of images that can be moving in the way certain words strung together can also move you.” These pictures are unquestionably moving.

In the 1930s, Bravo was hired to work for Mexican Folkways magazine. This permitted him to travel throughout Mexico, photographing its people and places and revealing aspects of Mexican culture in artful and creative compositions. (Bravo was a contemporary and friend of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, both of whom are shown in the warm portraits “Frida con globo/Frida with Globe” and “Diego Rivera.”)

The most unforgettable product of this documentary period is the heartbreaking “Striking Worker, Murdered.” In it, a young man who had been on strike for workers’ rights lies prone, shot dead, with a horrifying amount of blood pouring out the back of his head in a stream running toward the viewer, drying in the dirt road. Light catches on blood pooling in his ear, while his vacant eyes are narrow slits — he’s just a kid. Besides the graphic nature of the shot, what’s most effective is the crispness of his white T-shirt tucked into his pants, the belt resting peacefully in the loops, a sharp contrast to the violence that preceded the picture.

Elsewhere, Bravo’s work is surreal and frequently humorous, as evidenced in pictures like “Parabola optica/Optical Parable,” “Dos pares de piernas/Two Pairs of Legs,” “Mattress” and especially “Bicycle in the Sky.” In it, a bicycle is attached to the side of a building (presumably at a bicycle repair shop). The photo strives to be a visual trick, featuring clouds prominently in the background — and sure, from one perspective it looks like a bike in the sky. But then … there’s a man on a ladder, ruining the effect. Still, the joke is realized in its own way.

In “The Dreamer,” a transient man sleeps on the sidewalk, his body turned up toward the sun, his hand tucked between his legs for comfort. He’s surrounded by hard surfaces: the sidewalk he sleeps on, the concrete wall behind him. The only soft elements are bits of grass at his feet and head — and the comfortable form his body takes in sleep. The power of the picture is in the contrast between the fragile, vulnerable human and his harsh environment. It’s an unforgiving world, the pictures tell us, but it’s frequently graceful, even magical and poetic.

Bravo takes this idea further in one of his best-known photos, with the teasing and humorous title “The Good Reputation Sleeping.” A young woman lies on her back on a blanket, a hand behind her head, her feet and hands and part of her waist wrapped in bandages, her nubile body open and exposed. Oddly, several small cacti lie beside her, suggesting her vulnerability. But the model’s eyes are closed — she’s unfazed and confident — and the photo is powerful in its eroticism. Perhaps just as famous is the image in “Daydreaming,” where a young girl leans on a handrail, resting her chin forlornly in her hand, her expression falling somewhere between bored and thoughtful.

This portrait, like all of Bravo’s, gives the viewer a sense of peering into someone else’s soul.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Caja de Visiones/Box of Visions, Photography from the Collection of Mrs. Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, through June 2 at Belger Arts Center, 2100 Walnut, 816-474-3250.