Photographers [Oo] Lola Álvarez Bravo | Mexico’s first female photographer (1907 – 1993)

  Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1940                               Lola Álvarez Bravo, México, 1958

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“I was the only woman fooling around with a camera in the streets and all the reporters laughed at me. So I became a fighter.”

Lola Alvarez Bravo

 Lola Álvarez Bravo, Girl on Merry-Go-Round, 1950               Lola Alvarez Bravo, The Offer, 1946                 

 Lola Álvarez Bravo, Spy, 1948                            Lola Álvarez Bravo, México, 1940s    

Lola Alvarez Bravo, Leaving the Opera, 1950                        Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1950

Lola Alvarez Bravo (1907 – 1993), Mexican photographer. Orphaned very young, she was brought up by relations. In 1925 she married Manuel Álvarez Bravo, began by helping her husband in the darkroom, and went on to share the use of their camera. (Their son Manuelito, born in 1927, also became a photographer.) Their work brought the young couple into contact with other Mexican artists, and when they separated in the mid-1930s, Lola was sufficiently established to pursue an independent career as one of Mexico’s first female professional photographers. Her varied oeuvre included an extensive documentary record of everyday Mexican life, images of historical sites, and portraits of national and international figures from art and politics.