Brooks was born Reva Silverman and was the daughter of Jewish Polish immigrants. She married landscape painter Leonard Brooks (1911–2011) in 1935. In the late 1940s, the Brooks immigrated to Mexico, where they assisted in establishing an international art colony in the town of San Miguel de Allende and hosted a circle of friends that included Marshall McLuhan and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. There Reva Brooks developed an interest in photography and worked with a Rolleiflex to produce tightly cropped portraits, primarily of Indigenous subjects in Mexico. Photographer and editor Minor White featured one of Brooks’s photographs on the cover of the influential Aperture magazine in 1952. In 1955, MoMA curator Edward Steichen included one of Brooks’s first photographs, an image of a child who had recently died, in Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the first blockbuster photography exhibition. Although Brooks stopped photographing in the mid-1960s, she was named by the San Francisco Museum of Art as one of the top fifty women photographers in 1975, and the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a solo exhibition in 2002, shortly before her death at age ninety.

Image: Reva Brooks, Anciana Dona Chencha (Old Dona Chencha), printed in 1999, gelatin silver print, image: 29.9 x 22.9 cm, edition of 25, Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.

For further reading, see:

Brooks, Reva, Marilyn Westlake, and Margot Smallwood Boland. Reva Brooks Photographs. Toronto: M+M Art Press, 2003.

Mann, Margery, et al. Women of Photography: An Historical Survey. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1975.

“Reva Brooks: Photographer Extraordinaire.” Queen’s Quarterly 105, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 434–44.

Virtue, John. Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.