At the age of 22, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (b. 1902, Mexico City–d. 2002, Mexico City) purchased his first camera, officially permeating the photographic medium. Within a short period of time, Álvarez Bravo quit his job in the government and turned to an artistic career that would span roughly 80 years.1
Mingling among various artistic circles and perusing through artworks by his contemporaries and their predecessors in Mexico, he met many prominent artists and creative thinkers, such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Frida Khalo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, and Diego Rivera.2
Álvarez Bravo worked primarily in Mexico City and occasionally in surrounding rural areas. He is largely associated with the art movement of Surrealism and, as noted by art historian Roberto Tejada, he often made use of the capital city’s built environment to provide provocative frameworks for viewers to consider (Fig. 1).3
By the end of his life, Álvarez Bravo had produced an enormous body of work having over 150 solo exhibitions and participating in over 200 group exhibitions.4
Arguably one of the most famous Mexican photographers of the twentieth century, Alvarez Bravo’s work is recognized in the UNESCO Memory of the World registry (2017).5

On view in Time and Face: Daguerreotypes to Digital Prints and included in the MA in Art History Presents online exhibition, Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” (“. . . A Fish Called Saw”), was photographed between the years 1942 and 1944 and was later published as part of a portfolio printed in 1977 (Fig. 2).6
This photograph is a gelatin silver print, as were most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs. This photographic printing process is made with silver halides that are suspended in a layer of gelatin on paper. After, the halides are developed with a chemical developer, stop, and fixer that can all be chemically manipulated and toned to alter the finished product. Within the MA in Art History Presents online exhibition there are two other gelatin silver prints, discussed in Abbe Klein’s essay on Mike Disfarmer’s photographic portraits.

“. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” is emblematic of Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s signature style. A young woman whose name is not known (most of his subjects remained anonymous) holds a large fish while standing on a deck near a body of water that some photohistorians have identified as being near Acapulco, Mexico.7
A hazy landscape serves as a background to the composition. The subject stands with her right foot crossing the other, while her left foot sustains her weight. Though centered on just one foot, she possesses a certain weightlessness. Holding a Mexican sierra fish horizontally in her hands with a gentle grip, her palms softly face upward toward the sky. She looks off composedly, seeming to engage visually with something in the distance. She wears a patterned dress that appears to be polka-dotted. Covering her head and shoulders is a cloth, more precisely, a rebozo. Near her right elbow, we catch a glimpse of photographic blurring, suggesting that her rebozo was moving during the exposure of the photo—perhaps it was a breezy day. A speck of light highlights her nose and lightly caresses her décolletage.

The fish she holds reflects details of light along its head and the highest points of its body. Shadow lines are cast on her forearms as her elbows remain tucked and hidden in the shade while her wrists face upward exposed to the light—perhaps it was a sunny day. Such visual details enhance the feeling of human stillness as materialized by the camera’s snapshot. Multiple tonalities of gray populate the composition while most distinctly contrasted is the light gray sky—perhaps overcast, perhaps blue— with her onyx black rebozo (the real color of which is unknown). The bay acts as a horizon line and the land is scattered with hazy structures. Widest on the right-most side of the image, the land is drawn toward a small point at the left-most side, forming an elongated triangular shape. Such formal elements are mirrored in the foreground where a severed swordfish head lies, pointing toward the opposite side of the photo’s bounded edge. Diagonal lines divide the picture’s surface creating a sense of depth and dimensionality. A gruesome scene exists next to the girl’s stance—a severed fish head and a tail remain atop an overturned boat, scales scatter the surface, and blood eerily drips down the sides of the boat.

Álvarez Bravo’s masterful composition and lyrical vista remain indeterminate yet bewitching. The photograph points to an interesting aspect of the artist’s position: the camera is placed from a low-angle, thereby drawing the observer’s eye upward. The viewer ostensibly stands as from the height of a child, looking up at the subject, who, from such a photographic angle, has a heightened sense of heroism and monumentality— an unwavering presence. As such, the viewer becomes an essential component to this portrait, both collapsing and expanding our notions of visual space within the frame of the photo and outside of it in the space in which it physically exists. The apparently tranquil setting suggests an appetite for the future, or to a certain degree, an adolescent disposition as a liminal state between girlhood and womanhood. Indeed, her age is ambiguous. Nevertheless, her youthful presence creates a contentious dialogue when placed in proximity with the deck’s weathered state, evidenced by its height and spatial irregularities, as well as with the overturned boat and its bloody echoes of past butchery. Masculine associations of slaughter and bloodshed that inhabit the scene further enhance a discordant juxtaposition with the female sex of the young subject.

Having grown up behind the colonial-period Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City in the Zocalo Plaza, Álvarez Bravo acknowledged the historic voices that reverberated through his city walls.8
 He was mindful of his land’s indigenous and colonial pasts and the new industrial changes his city was facing. His early memories of gunfire and death allowed him to come to grips with mortality and its cost at a young age.9
 The Mexican Revolution began against a widespread dissatisfaction with the elitist and oligarchical policies of Porfirio Díaz, that had catered to the country’s wealthy citizens. Seldomly photographing paraphernalia directly associated with political tensions at the time, Álvarez Bravo instead favored habitual customs coupled with everyday life that conceivably created a controversial dialogue—political, or not.10
 The long shifting political geography posterior to the Revolution continued to live with the Mexican people for years after its official end, perhaps most felt within the class consciousness of the polarized landscapes between urban and rural Mexico.11
 Álvarez Bravo contended with such issues in his work, which suggests that “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” may or may not have been affiliated with such concepts.12

Though Álvarez Bravo wrestled with various aspects of photography, such as capturing the past, as well as with issues of stereotypes, his achievement was creating an engaging public space in which to discuss art, politics, as well as gender and sexual difference through photography, all while opposing the post-Revolutionary states’ ideological pledge to depoliticize.13
 Álvarez Bravo applied pressure to the wedge between bourgeois imperialism and the romanticization of the proletariat, according to critics like Tejada.14
 Standing forcibly as an anti-picturesque photographer, Álvarez Bravo was the first Mexican photographer to do so. Photography in Mexico appeared hardly six months after Louis Daguerre’s 1839 invention, the daguerreotype.15
 However, photography truly began to prosper during the years of the French Intervention (1864–1867), where photography was used as a tool to empower the Maximilian court and emperor. Photographs of the royal family, the court, and its Mexican supporters were exchanged in Mexico and overseas.16
 Contemporaneously, foreign photographers found interest in documenting the Mexican people, geography, and archaeological cultural heritage sites. This came with a wide Eurocentric fascination for “the other,” specifically for the South American and Central American people and their cultures. This artistic movement that comprised of photography and other art forms was an exoticized and romanticized regression to the pre-Conquest terrain of the Americas that attempted to “rediscover” the people, their cultures, and the land that they had been inhabiting for thousands of years prior to their being “discovered.”

Tejada argues that Álvarez Bravo employed irony, surrealistic motifs, and antithetical scenery (e.g. an ordinary activity that avoids idealization), making visible an uncommon perspective on the lives of Mexican people from this period with images that counteracted expectation.17
He roused the camera lens to embody not the righteous or heroic aspects of Mexico, but rather the social, economic, and material tensions felt by many. Álvarez Bravo’s images—and most assuredly “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra”—scatter symbolic traces within their frames and desire a viewer with a curious and patient eye.

Feminine identity and indigeneity are further explored in Álvarez Bravo’s photographs, and most convincingly in “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” through the application of various signs and symbols of myth and culture. As noted earlier, the girl wears a rebozo, an indigenous woven cloth that is passed down generation after generation through maternal lineage (Fig.3). It is an important artifact and cultural emblem for Mexican tradition, women’s practice, ceremonial custom, and is a representative keepsake for the Mexicanidad movement. The latter was a movement that was aimed at generating Mexican identity through “an array of icons and shorthand iterations—the murals, the indigenous subsoil, the manual arts, an attention to the ruins and the abrupt landscape, as well as a pantheon of ancient and contemporary mythologies[...]”.18
The presence of the rebozo and its historical association deserves attention and begs the question of whether the subject is a mother-to-be. Álvarez Bravo’s images contain a symbolic range where sex overlaps with the female social identity.19
He explored sexual identity and difference in studies of abstraction and formalism (Fig. 4). Staging certain shapes expressly for the camera and, in our example, the debatable sexual placement of the fish in the girl’s hands, may have been carefully fabricated even though it appears accidental or coincidental.

If a photograph can represent multiple temporalities apart from the moment of the camera’s snapshot, then we must question the first viewer of this scene as well as the masculine-centered gaze and its implications. What are the visual and erotic impacts on the dynamics of viewing— from both the photographer and the viewer? When we look to the woman in this image, how should we describe her countenance? Is it indeed, as I alluded to before, one of peace and tranquility, or an uncomfortable and distressing one? What narratives do we construct surrounding the image that the camera captures? A photograph is a static image, however, time did not stop around the second that the snapshot was taken. How do we reconcile static images with lived, kinetic, and animated bodies?

These questions offer ways in which to think about this photograph and others, whether looking at objects in this exhibition or beyond. Photographing until his death, Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s work continues to appeal to viewers in distinct and masterful ways by provoking spectators to look slowly and carefully at his photographs as they seldom represent what meets the eye at first glance. Through the examination of various signs and symbols, I have attempted to wade through the ambiguity presented by “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” and have offered scholastic evidence through which to better decipher the cultural and formal elements of the image. Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s aesthetic was aimed precisely at such dialogue—one of interpretive defiance. His artwork extends a certain kind of meditation on the very ethics of looking—our observation comes under scrutiny in itself.

• 1Frederick Kaufman, “An Essay of Memories,” in Manuel Alvarez Bravo Photographs and Memories (New York, N.Y. : Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1997), 78-79.
• 2“Manuel Álvarez Bravo.” Artnet. Accessed April 1, 2021.
• 3Roberto Tejada, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 127.; Ian Walker, “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Surrealism and Documentary Photography." Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 8:1 (2014), 22.
• 4“Manuel Álvarez Bravo.” Artnet.
• 5“The Archives of Negatives, Publications and Documents of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Memory of the World, 2017. Accessed April 1, 2021.
• 6Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s “. . . Un pez que llaman Sierra” (1942-44) has been translated as both “A Fish Called Saw” and in more recent literature as “A Fish Called Sierra.”
• 7Kaufman, “An Essay of Memories,” 51.
• 8Kaufman, “An Essay of Memories,” 4-5.
• 9Kaufman, “An Essay of Memories,” 7.
• 10Tejada, National Camera, 123.
• 11John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 246.
• 12Tejada, National Camera, 123.
• 13Tejada, National Camera, 123.
• 14Tejada, National Camera, 123.
• 15Beth Ann Guynn, “A Nation Emerges: 65 Years of Photography in Mexico.” 65 Years of Photography in Mexico (Getty Research Institute), 2010.
• 16Guynn, “A Nation Emerges.”
• 17Tejada, National Camera, 136.
• 18Gustavo G.Velázquez, El rebozo en el Estado de México (México: Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México, 1981), 15-17; Tejada, National Camera, 101-102.
• 19Tejada, National Camera, 116.