This summer the Academy Art Museum proudly presents Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography, an exhibition containing fifty-four vintage prints by such influential American photographers as Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Helen Levitt, as well as their international contemporaries, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. Highlights of the exhibition include Edward Weston’s Chayotes (1924), an early palladium print that presages his later still life compositions of shells and peppers; Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle (1927), a politically charged still life. Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s La siesta de los pergrinos (The Rest of the Migrants) (1930s), Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Calle Cuauhtemoctzín, Mexico City (1934), and Helen Leavitt’s Mexico City (1941), are all superb examples by the artists and illustrate the “accidental theater of the street” captures by their cameras.

Like Paris in the aftermath of World War I, Mexico City after the decade-long Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) underwent one of the greatest artistic flowerings of the twentieth century and became a magnet for international artists and photographers. There, artists became close friends and freely exchanged ideas, equipment, and techniques, which often resulted in dramatic shifts in their artistic practices. During his three-year sojourn in Mexico between the years 1923 and 1926, Edward Weston completely reinvented his approach to making photographs. The soft-focus painterliness that had characterized his studio portraiture in the nineteen-teens melted away under the brilliant Mexican sun to be replaced by crystalline landscapes.

“The camera should be used for a recording of life for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston wrote. “Whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh…I feel definite in the belief that the approach to photography is through realism.”
Thus, too, began his initial explorations in still life compositions—those of Mexican ollas and other domestic vessels—which would foreshadow his later compositions of shells and peppers.

Meanwhile, Weston’s paramour and protégé, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, had a similar transformation while in Mexico and created images that would place her among the great photographers of the modern era. Her politically charged compositions and membership in the Communist Party, however, would ultimately force her to leave the country, but not before influencing yet another artist—Manuel Álvarez Bravo, her close friend and protégé. In 1930, Modotti gifted Bravo her large-format view camera, which he would use to document everyday life in the streets of the city and go on to become Mexico’s greatest photographer. As with his mentor, Bravo befriended another photographer—the young painter-turned-photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson—who had come to Mexico to spend the year photographing in the brilliant natural light not often found in his native Paris.

“Cartier-Bresson and I did not photograph together but we walked the same streets and photographed many of the same things,” Álvarez Bravo recalled.
Lastly, the photographs by Helen Levitt taken in Mexico City in 1941 are a notable exception to her otherwise exclusive focus on New York City and its streets during her long career, which spanned the 1930s through 1970s. But the principal subject matter of Levitt’s work was the same in both cities: the lives of children in working-class neighborhoods. Levitt printed her Mexican photographs only after returning to New York, where they contributed to her fledgling reputation. Her first one-woman exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943 included sixteen photographs from Mexico.

This exhibition invites visitors to discover the rich history, landscape, people, and culture of Mexico just as experienced by the photographers themselves nearly a century ago–opening space for reflection on the ways cultural narratives are seen, shared and understood.

Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. All works are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.