Que chiquito es el mundo
Photograph
Que chiquito es el mundo
How small the world is
1942
Gelatin silver print, printed later
Image: 17.4 × 24.3 cm (6 7/8 × 9 9/16 in.)
Mount: 35 × 44.7 cm (13 3/4 × 17 5/8 in.)
Museum accession
1973.0063.0013
Inscriptions [no inscriptions]
TextBy the end of the 1920s, the self-taught photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, known as the “father of Mexican photography,” began to adapt the principles of modernism—unmanipulated prints, precise composition, sharp focus—to transform ordinary scenes into fantastical visions. Delighted by the photographer’s eye for the uncanny, French poet André Breton (1896–1966) conscripted Álvarez Bravo into the ranks of the Surrealists. The photograph here bears the hallmarks of the Mexican’s Surrealism. In a chance encounter captured by the camera, a woman appears to offer a package to a man passing her with an air of indifference.
