Black-and-white photograph of a woman leaning out of a window, shadowed in a cross-hatch lattice

Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography

Now showing1 September 2026 – 3 January 2027Free

Works by 13 photographers including the Álvarez Bravos, Héctor García and Graciela Iturbide, drawn from a 25-year gift to the Getty tracing a century of Mexican photographic creativity.

Exhibition website

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On now All of November 2026

In 1931 Manuel Álvarez Bravo photographed an optician's shop front, its Óptica moderna sign clearly legible. By 1935 it was being shown flipped, a darkroom accident he liked enough to keep, and the mirrored print became one of his best-known pictures.

The show isn't chronological. Thirteen photographers, from the late 1920s to the mid-2010s, hang in five sections named after lines by Octavio Paz, pairing teachers with students and friends with partners. You go from Pedro Meyer's nautilus shell, shot so close it loses its scale, to Graciela Iturbide's pictures of Frida Kahlo's sealed-up bathroom, and end on Pablo Ortiz Monasterio's series about the 43 Ayotzinapa students who disappeared in 2014.

Digital Camera World called the close-up section "a masterclass in framing". Entry is free with a timed reservation, it's on the lower level of the Museum West Pavilion, and labels are in English and Spanish. The GettyGuide app has a bilingual audio tour, so bring headphones.

Look for

Optical Parable, 1931
Álvarez Bravo's optician storefront, and the wall text on how a darkroom slip flipped it in 1935 into the version that became famous.
Iturbide in Frida Kahlo's bathroom
Crutches, orthopaedic braces and a Stalin poster sit together in the tub, belongings Diego Rivera had sealed away after Kahlo's death.
Diego y Siqueiros, 1957
Rodrigo Moya's portrait of the two rival muralists standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a mural.
Meyer and Salcedo Méndez close-ups
A nautilus shell shot so close its scale disappears, and seed pods against black that read as sculpture rather than plants.
Do They Disappear?, 2014 onward
Look for Ortiz Monasterio's wind-bent cactus with graffiti beneath it demanding the return of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students.

Good for

Cheap Culture
Evening Visits
Going Solo
Nerding Out

Skip if

You want one clear timeline: the show is grouped by five poetic themes, not chronology.

With kids

A bilingual collage workshop and screen-printing demonstrations run alongside the show from 4 October to 13 December. The final section deals with the 2014 disappearance of 43 students.