NEW YORK, NY.- Throckmorton Fine Art is presenting a major show of work by Latin American photographer Mario Algaze from April 9 – May 16 at its New York gallery.

Spencer Throckmorton says, “’Our Mario Algaze: A Respect for Light’ show comprises exquisite black and white photographs of street scenes and interiors taken in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia and other Latin American countries between 1974 and 2011. They focus on light and the poetic narrative of life.

“Mario’s works, made in the classic tradition of modernist, black and white photography, comes out of a long Latin American tradition whose father is the surrealist Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Inspiration has also come from artists like Rufino Tamayo, Giorgio De Chirico, the written works of Gabriel García Márquez, Tennessee Williams, and from films like Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Algaze packs each frame with filmic narrative.”

Throckmorton Executive Director Kraige Block adds that, “ Some of Algaze’s photographs, like Desaparecidos, Buenos Aires, 1984; and Cotton Candy, San Angel, Mexico, D.F., 1981, are mysterious, magical-realist moments, while others like Club La Paz, La Paz, Bolivia, 1989 or El laboratorio del Dr. Paz-Viera, Cartagena, Colombia, 1987 create poetry from the everyday. The images provide an immersive experience of place, their glowing light animating the scene.”

Algaze favors the morning hours – the magical time when the sun casts a soft glow on the landscape. His streets are often almost empty and figures, which he often captures at a distance, are elegantly choreographed to freeze heightened moments of grace. The human presence is very important to the photographer, who often waits for figures to enter the scene, thereby coalescing its magic before he takes the photograph. The picture plane is always tightly composed— it is obvious that every part of the frame is carefully considered. This interest in finding and building geometries lies in the classic modernist tendency to seek order from chaos.

Algaze has the soul of a storyteller. He seeks what he terms, profundidad— the depth of human emotion. His photographs are as much about the artist’s own search for the self as they are about the places and people that he photographs. They reveal inner states of mind and simultaneously tell stories about endurance, ancient traditions and their intersection with contemporary life.

Born in Cuba in 1947, Algaze relocated with his family to Miami in 1960 just after the Cuban Revolution. Algaze is a self-taught photographer who began his career in 1970 as a freelance journalist. From 1979 to 1981, he was owner and director of Gallery Exposures in Coral Gables, Florida. Algaze’s work has been the focus of many one-person and group exhibits nationally and internationally, including at the University of California, San Diego; Throckmorton Gallery, New York; John Cleary Gallery, Houston; Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

His works are in many public, private and corporate collections including those of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Miami Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach; Lehigh University Art Galleries; and the Museum Tamayo, Mexico City, among others.

He received an individual Florida Artist Fellowship from the Florida Arts Council in 1989, a Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Photography, Institute of Education, United Nations, New York, New York in 1991, and several fellowships sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 and 1992. Monographs include; Mario Algaze Portafolio Latinamericano, (Munich: Gina Kehayoff. 1997); Mario Algaze: Cuba 1999-2000, (New York: Throckmorton Fine Art, 1999-2000); Mario Algaze Portfolio, (Miami Beach: Di Puglia Publisher, 2010), and most recently, Mario Algaze, A Respect for Light: The Latin American Photographs: 1974 2008, (New York: Glitterati Incorporated, 2014).

In late 2014, Algaze’s work was the focus of a major retrospective at History Miami. The Exhibition was made possible in part by Capes Sokol Goodman and Sarachan PC.

Throckmorton Fine Art is the premier dealer offering vintage and contemporary Latin American photography, Pre-Columbian art, Chinese jades and Tribal art. The gallery participates in internationally acclaimed fairs, including The Winter Antiques Show in New York each January, AIPAD and during March offers Chinese Jades during ASIA WEEK. The gallery’s commitment to connoisseurship is underscored by its sales to such major museums as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, along with the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Portions of collections the gallery was instrumental in forming have been donated to the Louvre. The gallery loans examples on a regular basis to such significant institutions as the National Gallery in London.