Death Portrait Of A Child

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Death Portrait of a Child The photograph Death Portrait of a Child was made by German photographer Hugo Brehme. Brehme was born in Germany in 1882 and died in Mexico in 1954. He was considered one of the outstanding photographers of Mexico. Around 1905 when he was in his twenties, Brehme arrived in Mexico to photograph the complex and fascinating country. He studied photography in Germany and brought a pictorialist's eye and a complete command of his expensive equipment. He would not have known that he would become a major influence on generations of Mexican photographers, starting with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. He would not have known that he would live in Mexico almost all of his life and even become a Mexican citizen shortly before his death. Nor did he ever dream that his work would become known all over the world.

Brehme considered himself an artist even though debates at the time concerned over whether or not photography is an art.

In 1912, Brehme established his first studio at la San Juan de Letran No.3 in Mexico City. In 1920 he established a studio at Avenida Cinco de Mayo No.27, and called it "Fotografia Artistica Hugo Brehme". It was in this studio that Manuel Alvarez Bravo worked and learned the fundamentals of photography.

The photograph entitled Death Portrait of a Child by Brehme is a photograph of a dead child being held by two women, probably the child's mother and grandmother. This type of photograph was called a daguerreotype. The death portrait, especially one of a dead child, was a memorial. If the daguerreotype served as an accurate portrait of the soul, of a person's essence, it was doubly effective, with its accuracy and haunting depth, a way of keeping the memory of a dead child fresh, or...