Seeing Mexico Photographed : The Work of Horne, Casasola, Modotti, and Alvarez Bravo

This engrossing book presents the photographs of four historically engaged artists and explains what they reveal about the highly dramatic revolutionary and post-revolutionary period in Mexico from 1910 to 1935. The works of these photographersAmerican Walter H. Horne, Italian Tina Modotti, and Mexicans Agustin VictorCasasola and Manuel Alvarez Bravoare discussed not just as windows onto events but as artworks that offer both objective reporting and stylized expression. The twenty-five years covered in the book encompass some of the most convulsive developments in Mexico, from the violence and cataclysmic changes wrought by the Mexican Revolution to the immense struggles to forge a new nation and a new government. During this period, the work of the four photographerstwo primarily documentary, one propagandistic, and one artistic and personalenabled Mexicans to understand the forces that had brought their nation to armed conflict and social transformation.

Leonard Folgarait is professor of art history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.