PORTLAND – Lola Alvarez Bravo (1903-1993), a pioneering figure in the rise of modernist photography in Mexico, is widely recognized as Mexico’s first woman photographer. Alvarez Bravo was a profound humanist who used the camera to chronicle the people and places of her beloved country over a remarkable six-decade career. On view Jan. 5 through March 16, the Portland Museum of Art will feature 55 vintage photographs spanning Alvarez Bravo’s entire career.

The first major representation of her work in over a decade, the exhibition will include several rarely seen and unpublished photographs and an excerpt from a short film by Alvarez Bravo featuring painter Frida Kahlo.

Alvarez Bravo’s oeuvre can be understood in the context of Mexico’s great post-Revolution cultural renaissance, which attracted such international artistic figures as Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. She was a central figure in the Mexican modern art movement, and counted among her friends such luminaries as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, María Izquierdo and David Alfaro Siqueiros, all of whom she photographed.

Her best-known portraits, and ultimately the work for which she gained international recognition, are those of her colleague and friend Frida Kahlo. Primarily taken between 1944-45, these portraits reveal an acute knowledge of Kahlo’s physical and emotional state of pain and conflict.

Working with a diverse range of subjects and techniques, Alvarez Bravo was a photojournalist, portraitist and street photographer, as well as a teacher and curator. She moved to Mexico City from her hometown in Jalisco at age three, and Mexico City remained her home base for the rest of her long life – except for two years in Oaxaca with her then-husband, the great Mexican photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

She began making photographs under his tutelage in 1926. Although some of her earlier work reflects Manuel’s influence – they shared the same cameras and often the same roll of film – Alvarez Bravo achieved her own aesthetic during the 1940s and ’50s, concentrating on two particularly vivid bodies of work: Portraiture and street photography.

Her work is a spontaneous discovery of life lived in the moment – of human interactions, ritual and the tasks of everyday life. She photographed outdoor barbers; letter writers in Santo Domingo; participants in religious rituals; children playing; people reading, sleeping, waiting, and watching. She was a magnificent storyteller who depicted her subjects with honesty, curiosity, and an abiding affection.

If you go

The Portland Museum of Art, Maines largest art museum, showcases fine and decorative arts from the 18th century to the present. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and students with I.D., $4 for youth ages 6 to 17, and children under 6 are free. The museum is free on Friday evenings from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.