Rhapsody in the gambling dens of San Francisco, movie star in Hollywood, spy and femme fatale, revolutionary in Mexico and volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896-Mexico City, 1942) was undoubtedly a woman of action. , but above all a visionary photographer whose life, brief but intense, goes through some of the most turbulent events of the 1920s and 1930s. She died when she was 46 years old of a heart attack while riding in a taxi (that’s the official story, but rumors point to a murder or even suicide) and left behind just over 400 images, a smaller number but enough to make her one of the legends of 20th century Latin American photography.
Edward Weston’s model, who fell in love with her and immortalized her in a series of dazzling nudes, was her model, her lover and her apprentice, and as so often happens, his name paled for years under her shadow until in the years seventy began to be rescued from oblivion. “Weston taught him a lot, but the humanity and social commitment in Modotti’s work are all his,” says Isabel Tejada, curator of the most important exhibition of his work to date, vintage copies from important museums and collections.
For this reason, in the exhibition that can be seen until September 3 at the KBr of the Mapfre Foundation, the curator is not afraid of confronting the images of both. Weston was brilliant and possessed a formal and rigorous skill in composition, qualities that Modotti learned, “but unlike him, she was always looking for people, she recognized herself in them. She had what I call an incarnated gaze, for being a woman, for being an immigrant, for belonging to a modest class, and for being a communist.â€
Born into a working-class family in Udine (northern Italy), Modotti, speaking no English, crossed the Atlantic alone to meet her father and sister in San Francisco. She worked as a seamstress, but soon began taking to the stages of the Latino community as a rhapsode. She married Roubaix de L’Abrie Richéy, a French-Canadian American poet known as Robo, who introduced her to the world of Hollywood. She enjoyed some success with titles like The Tiger’s Coat, though she grew weary of being cast as a gypsy or harem girl.
And it was after meeting Weston that together they decided to try their luck in Mexico. The affair ended four years later. Weston returned to the United States, where he had left his wife and children, and Modotti began his journey as a communist militant that forced him, shortly after, to abandon photography. Weston, on the other hand, would continue producing photos until almost the end of his life.
Modotti, the curator points out, found a place for herself in the creative and optimistic Mexico that celebrated the rise to power of the leftist Ãlvaro Obregón in 1920. She became friends with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros, became the a photographer for the muralists, she joined the Communist Party, collaborated with the workers’ newspaper El Machete, empathized with the indigenous people (she portrays Indians carrying large wads of corn or blocks of stone, demonstrating under their hats as if they were a single body) and reflected the process of transformation of cities.
There are scenes of women and children in the streets and mothers breastfeeding their children, “whom he sees as transmitters of ideals,” says Tejada. Her life began to turn upside down when her new lover, Julio Antonio Mella, the leader of the Cuban communist party, was gunned down as they walked down the street. Modotti was tried for conspiracy in the murder. She was acquitted, but would again be falsely accused of conspiring to kill the new Mexican president, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and was deported in 1930. First to Berlin and from there to Moscow, where, according to Neruda, she threw the camera into a river. .
There are no photos of his stay in Spain during the Civil War. She called herself MarÃa and she was the coordinator of Socorro Rojo Internacional. “A brigadista assures, however, that some of the photographs in Miguel Hernández’s book Viento del pueblo, which she edited, were hers,” explains Tejada, who says that she also worked as a Pasionaria nurse in a Madrid hospital. When the Republican cause was shattered, she returned to Mexico, with a false passport.
