His fascinating biography still retains a halo of mystery. The photographer, actress and activist Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896-Mexico City, 1942) was a notable figure of insurgent Mexico in the 1920s, a country and a time from which mythical names such as the artists Diego Ribera and José Clemente Orozco, with whom he shared a friendship and whose famous murals he captured in his snapshots.
A great exponent of committed and avant-garde social photography, both his life and his work are surrounded by gaps that, despite in-depth study, have only been partially filled. Her photographic work was rescued from oblivion in her country starting in the 1970s and, today, an extraordinary exhibition aims to shed light on her legend, both in her artistic and professional facet and in her role. as a revolutionary and anti-fascist militant.
Fundación MAPFRE’s KBr space is hosting the Tina Modotti exhibition until September 3, being the largest that has been held on her to date. The space brings together nearly 250 photographs, some of them unpublished, as well as an extensive amount of documentary material and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The tour is completed with works by photographers close to her, such as Edward Weston, one of the most influential of the 20th century and whom she met after emigrating to San Francisco (USA) with his family.
She had a sentimental relationship with Weston and worked as a model, assistant and apprentice, as well as becoming an actress in still silent films. She traveled to Mexico with Weston and met with the members of the Communist Party of Mexico, a reference for the most disadvantaged and the country’s intellectual circles. In 1930, Modotti was arrested and expelled under the false accusation of having taken part in an attack against President Pascual Ortiz Rubio and, after living in different European cities, in 1934 she ended up in Spain where she attended the end of the Second Republic. .
During the Civil War, she assumed the coordination of the Spanish Red Aid, taking care of getting the so-called children of war out of the country, caring for the wounded in hospitals as a nurse or dedicating herself to propaganda activities. After crossing the Pyrenees wearing what she was wearing, along with thousands of Spaniards and political exiles, she returned to Mexico, where a heart attack would take her with only 45 years.
His nomadic life and his hectic political militancy caused Modotti to leave many of the countries in which he lived, such as Mexico, the Soviet Union, France, Germany and Spain, which, as the curator of the exhibition Isabel Tejeda points out, “decontextualizes and it messes up his production, making it impossible to accurately date many of his images”, although almost all his photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930. By then he had found his own voice.
Over the years, the artist evolved from the perfection of abstract forms to a personal perspective characterized by her attraction to the human being and social injustices. Modotti, whose father was captivated by the American dream, portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, the inequalities and misery of urban areas, as well as focusing on women and their role within the community and the emancipation of the class worker.
He knew what he was photographing because he had seen it firsthand. In his eagerness to awaken consciences, Modotti captured images that denounce injustices and honor the dispossessed, some of them for propaganda purposes. His work has never been able to separate from a turbulent life marked by especially tragic events. Modotti watched as one of his lovers, Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, was shot dead while walking with him down a street in Mexico City.
Conspiracies and ideological struggles involved his figure, while there is no trace of Modotti’s photographs taken in Spain. Although the doubt remains, as the curator Isabel Tejeda points out, if two of the 17 photographs that appear in Viento del pueblo, poetry in the war by Miguel Hernández, published in Valencia in 1937 by Ediciones Socorro Rojo, could be attributed to the artist. The mystery about her prevails while her brave heart will always be remembered in the verses that Pablo Neruda dedicates to her in I confess that I have lived.
