Speaking in visual parables, the deliberate illusions of ninety-nine year-old Mexican master Manuel Alvarez Bravo illuminate the ordinary with their formal beauty and lyrical wit. Exposing the world as metaphor, he lays bare the universal themes of death, desire, and solitude that lurk behind the familiar. Everyday life is stripped to its emblematic essence, and his transcendent vision of a world full of symbols and secrets is both magical and sublime. In the words of poet Roberto Tejada, "his photography is a concise vision of Mexico, and of a larger imaginary landscape of life forms, in some ways more vibrant now against the fading half-light of a century."