Although Manuel Alvarez Bravo never traveled to Europe, he learned much about artistic developments abroad through his extensive reading of photographic magazines as well as his regular contact with vanguard artists such as Rufino Tamayo and Tina Modotti. He never considered himself a Surrealist— in Urinating Child, he employed an angled, cropped view characteristic of the modernist idiom—but his work was nonetheless appropriated by André Breton in the mid-1930s. The two met in 1938 when Breton visited Mexico, and Breton featured Alvarez Bravo’s work in the last issue of the Surrealist journal Minotaure (1939) accompanied by Breton’s essay “Souvenir of Mexico.”