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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 Alvarez Bravo (1907–1993) was Mexico’s first woman photographer, and her career is exceptional both for its remarkable range and for the compelling quality of her work. Approach­ing photography from multiple angles, she worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, and professional portraitist, while also creating intensely personal images of people, places, and things throughout her native Mexico. In addition, she played a vital role in the Mexican cultural scene, as an inspiring teacher of photography, as friend of innumerable artists and writers (many of whom she photographed), and as owner of a prestigious gallery that pre­sented the first solo show by her friend Frida Kahlo, the subject of some of Alvarez Bravo’s most powerful portraits.
Although some of her photographs reflect the influence of her husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo--they shared the same cameras and often the same roll of film--Lola had achieved her own aesthetic by the 1940s and 50s, concentrating on two particularly vivid bodies of work, portraiture and street photography. In these two disciplines she found a way to reveal a lyricism in the world around her, producing quiet reveries on life lived in the moment. This first English-language book to encompass the full range of her work includes previously unpublished images and several of her little-known photomontages.

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Text from the book Lola Alvarez Bravo, essay by Elizabeth Ferrer. foreword by Douglas R. Nickel.

Quote from Luminous Lint