Álvarez Bravo is considered one of the great masters of 20th-century photography. The approximately 50 black-and-white images featured in "Caja de Visiones" are works taken from about 1920 through 1940 in Álvarez Bravo's native Mexico. The photographs include street scenes and portraits, but taken with an eye for the fantastic.

Business signs and advertisements photographed out of context create bizarre scenes. In one of Álvarez Bravo's most famous works, Optical Parable, signs outside an optometrist's office become a collage of staring eyes. Álvarez Bravo also reversed the negative so that all the words on the signs are backwards. In another photo, a detail of a billboard depicts two pairs of disembodied legs that almost seem to dangle down on the side of a building.

His works also include portraits that use dramatic lighting and intriguing poses. One of Álvarez Bravo's most well known photos, The Daughter of the Dancers, shows a girl peering through a mysterious hole in the wall.

Álvarez Bravo's photography is sometimes noted for the unusual perspective it offered on Mexico, which at the time was often depicted as exotic or picturesque, with scenes of "peasants" in white clothing and straw hats. Although Álvarez Bravo found surreal aspects in everyday life, he documented the realities of urban and rural life in Mexico without romanticizing it.

Álvarez Bravo was a self-taught photographer who began working at a time when the avant-garde movement hit a peak in Mexico. Just a few years after he took up photography, he became friends with well-known photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, who were drawn to Mexico by the vitality of the art scene there. Álvarez Bravo also later documented the work of legendary mural painter Diego Rivera.

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