Anton BRUEHL
Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919

Huacales, Amanalco [Huacles, Amanalco] 1932
gelatin silver photograph
Singed on matt, recto, pencil, lower right, 'Anton Bruehl'.
image 49.1 (h) x 39.6 (w) cm
Gift of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc., New York, NY, USA, made possible with the generous support of Anton Bruehl Jr, 2006.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NGA 2006.162

Bruehl interspersed his portraits of people with three scenes of the markets at Amanalco, a town west of Mexico City. Bruehl introduces the language of Modernist photography pioneered in Europe in the 1920s by photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko. This way of working exploited the ability of the camera to capture scenes unexpectedly from unusual vantage points – here, from above, using a bird’s eye perspective. Such stylistic devices serve to abstract and flatten the space as well as add dynamism.