“Men of Mexico” at Throckmorton Fine Art is the counterpart to the “Women of Mexico” exhibition the gallery featured last year at this time. The men whose work is shown had many links with each other and with the women shown last year; most conspicuously, Lola Alvarez Bravo, whose work was shown last year, is the wife of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, probably the most accomplished Mexican photographer of the 20th century and a mainstay of this year’s show. Mexico is the inheritor of ancient Spanish, European, and Native American cultures, which a relatively small group of midcentury photographers synthesized with Modernist impulses to startling effect: It is not surprising that these adventurers sought each other out for instruction, encouragement, criticism, and companionship.

Manuel Bravo (1902-2002) is represented by nine pictures, including two of his most famous. “Retrato de lo eterno/Portrait of the Eternal” (1935) is a portrait of Isabel Villasenor, an artist, poet, singer, and songwriter. She is shown in profile staring at herself in a handheld mirror. The picture is unusual because of its use of harshly contrasting qualities of light: An intense band of light falls across her nose and mouth, the hand with the mirror, part of the dark tresses that fall to her waist, and the front of her white dress. The rest of her and the background is in shadow, with just enough light to make out her eye, her other hand adjusting her shawl around her head, the wide floorboards, and a suggestion of objects in the space behind her. There is an equally strong psychological contrast between the private intensity with which she examines herself in the mirror and the public exposure of her narcissistic introspection in a photograph. What does she see of herself that we are missing? And, conversely, does Bravo’s carefully framed and exposed picture show us something she does not, and cannot know?

“La Hija de los Danzantes” (1933) is another of Bravo’s many images that are themselves about acts of seeing. In this instance, we have no idea what the young daughter of the dancers is looking at. She stands with her back to us, barefoot with one foot on top of the other to gain height, straining to look through a round opening in a wall. Her white dress, her shawl, and especially the sombrero slung on her back identify her as indisputably Mexican. The wall is painted with a formal checkered pattern of black and white, but the paint is peeling, suggesting the age of the building. Her right arm is raised to brace her at the frame of the window, but what is she straining to see? The past, the future, something forbidden, a family friend, a lover? The medium-format Graflex Bravo used for his work produces an image of great clarity and detail, but the image is a charming puzzle, with ambiguity – as represented by the darkness in the circle – at its center.

Bravo met Tina Modotti, the red-hot Bolshevik tootsie, in 1927. He had studied literature and painting, and was only just getting involved in photography when she introduced him to Edward Weston, who at that time was on the lam in Mexico from his career as a door-to-door salesman in California and from his wife and family. It was Weston (1886-1958) who brought Bravo, and through him other Mexican photographers, into contact with what was happening in the medium in America and Europe. Weston himself evolved considerably under the influence of exogenous cultures: There are eight of his images in “Men of Mexico” including a picture of Modotti, “Tina, Nude on Azotea on Striped Blanket (frontal)” (1924), and “Portrait of Diego Rivera/Retrato de Diego Rivera” (1923). The frequency with which artists of various sorts were subjects for the photographers points to how close-knit the avant-garde circle in Mexico, and especially Mexico City, was.

My favorite of the Weston pictures is “Rose, Mexico (Rosa Covarrubias)” (1926), a head-shot of the wife of the painter Miguel Covarrubias. As with many pictures in this exhibition, the strong Mexican sunlight is an important element. In this case, it comes from directly above, so that the top of her head is brightly lit; her nose casts a shadow on her chin, and her chin on her neck. At the top of her round head, her shiny black hair is parted neatly in the middle and pulled into two braided buns over her ears. The curves of her heavy, dark eyebrows are matched by the opposing curves made by the shadows on her cheeks. Her eyes are shut against the intensity of the sun, but her pleasant smile signals her desire to cooperate with the photographer. It is a very pleasant face, too old to be called innocent, but fresh, not jaded, almost jolly, and, to the extent that most of the pictures of women in both of the Throckmorton “Mexico” shows are meant to be understood as symbolic of their country, benign.

Several of the same descriptions would apply to “Frida Kahlo in her Rebozo,” one of a series of pictures of her made by the German-born Fritz Henle (1909-93) on his first visit to Mexico in 1936.Again the sun overhead, the shiny black hair parted in the middle, and shadows cast by parts of her face on other parts. But no one ever accused Frida Kahlo, the operatic Marxist, of innocence: Here she looks constrained, inwardly reflective. The ubiquitous Kahlo showed up in “Women of Mexico” in a picture by Lola Alvarez Bravo, and because Kahlo’s father Guillermo (1872-1941) was an important Mexican photographer of the early 20th century, she is a vital nexus in this series.

Hugo Brehme (1882-1954), a contemporary of Guillermo Kahlo’s, has several pictures in the exhibition, mostly the architectural studies he specialized in. Manuel Bravo acknowledged Brehme as his first inspiration, and his early efforts reflected Brehme’s pictorialism. But Bravo’s later contact with Weston cured him of pictorialism and made him a Modernist. Hector Garcia (b. 1942) studied under Bravo at the Institute of Arts and Cinematography: His “Jose Clemente Orozco”(1945), with its dramatic selective focus, continues the tradition of photographs of artists, part of a daisy chain of instruction and influence that binds together so many of these Mexican photographers.

Until September 17 (145 E. 57th Street, 3rd floor, between Lexington and Third Avenues, 212-223-1059).