Tina Modotti “dwelt for almost her entire existence in the heart of the storm”, as pointed out by Isabel Tejeda Martín, the curator of the retrospective that the Barcelona room KBr dedicates to this important photographer and activist of Italian origin who, in just eight years (from 1923 to 1930), produced most of the images that have made it a fundamental part of the history of eighth art.
His nomadic career and his political militancy allowed him to be an exceptional witness, and in some cases a protagonist, of singular events in the first half of the 20th century: from the conversion of Hollywood cinema into a great mass spectacle to the Spanish Civil War, through the cultural and political evolution of Mexico, with the recovery of indigenous culture after the revolution.
Modotti’s camera offers tremendously eloquent testimonies of a convulsed time in the social and political spheres, but his gaze avoids any epic or artistic fatuity to always be at the service of common people and places. She herself will affirm in 1929: “In reality, what I try to produce is not art, but honest photographs, without tricks or manipulations, while most photographers still seek ‘artistic effects’ or the imitation of other means of expression.” graph”.
Although his works, especially in the early years, have beautiful compositions -as we see in Partial view of the telegraphic system (c. 1927), with a “geometrized” vision that can recall the sobriety of the supporters of the new objectivity, an avant-garde that influenced her–, there is no desire for artifice or excesses of aestheticism in them, but rather a permanent need to investigate the real.
In addition to the usual cultural obstacles to the due recognition of so many women, is added the life journey of an artist who, on several occasions, suddenly leaves the countries in which she lives, and is even forced to get rid of materials, as happens when she is expelled from Mexico and leaves her belongings to a friend, also a photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. This will make it difficult to reconstruct the catalog and chronology of a work that will sometimes be wrongly attributed to her first mentor, the American Edward Weston.
There are also various gaps in a career that has often been reduced to the most striking aspects related to sentimental or sexual encounters. For this reason, his first biographer, Mildred Constantine, speaks of the “Modotti puzzle”.
Tina was born in Udine, in northern Italy, in 1896. Little is known of a childhood that, according to her last sentimental partner, Vittorio Vidali, was marked by poverty. She was the third of seven children in a family consisting of a mechanic father and a seamstress mother. She soon began working as a spinner to help the domestic economy.
The father tries to look for new opportunities in Austria and then in the United States. In 1913, at just thirteen years old, Tina decides to join him in San Francisco. There she works in a hat factory and a tailor shop, and she also participates in theatrical experiences with emigrants.
In the Californian city he discovers, according to the historian Claudio Natoli, “an incomparably broader world, open and full of multicultural stimuli.” She will soon travel to Los Angeles and arrive in Hollywood, where she will have a short-lived acting career. Her dark hair, deep gaze and her dark complexion are ideal for playing “exotic” characters, with Latin names like Carmencita or Rosa.
His best-known film is the silent love affair drama The Tiger’s Coat (Roy Clements, 1920), where he plays a servant who assumes the identity of a deceased young woman about to get married. Later, she will show her rejection of that typecasting in the stereotype of “Italian beauty”.
For a while he gives free rein to his concerns by writing poetry. At the same time, he frequented the artistic circles that surrounded his partner at the time, the artist and poet Roubaix de L’Abrie “Robo” Richey. Thanks to this, she meets Weston, who will be the one to introduce her to the photograph.
First, Tina is a model (and lover) of the artist. She later becomes a helper and disciple. Eventually, she becomes a full-fledged artist. As Laura Mulvey, a film and image theorist with a feminist perspective, has explained, Modotti manages to go from being an “object of beauty” that serves the art of others to being a “professional photographer”.
His work progressively emancipated from the influence of Weston to acquire its own character. Tina is very clear about the artistic function of photography, despite the reluctance of those she describes as “myopic, who continue to look at this 20th century with the eyes of the 18th century and who, therefore, are incapable of accepting the manifestations of our mechanical civilization.
In his work, he uses the camera “as a tool or as the painter uses his brush”. Rosa Casanova, one of his biographers, perfectly sums up his artistic transformation, “from straight photography, filtered by Weston’s preciousness, to documentary”.
The USA is not only a place of vital and artistic discovery, but also the prelude to the consolidation of its political consciousness. In the words of Natoli, California becomes “a gateway to the artists of a Mexico fresh out of the 1917 Revolution, to the political and cultural renaissance, as well as to the yearnings for emancipation from the domination of the traditional oligarchies and the oppressive American tutelage.
“Robo”, disillusioned by the relationship that Tina is maintaining with Weston, goes to Mexico with the intention of organizing an exhibition of Californian photographers. There, in 1922, he contracted smallpox and died shortly after Tina arrived in the country, to be with him at her deathbed.
Despite the coup, she decides to settle with Weston in Mexico City, excited about the so-called Mexican renaissance of muralists like Diego Rivera (who will include Tina in several of his works) or David Alfaro Siqueiros; and also with the profound transformations that the country is undergoing in the agricultural sphere, with cooperatives, and in the cities, with the development of trade unionism. Her political awareness is reflected even in the decor of her apartment. As Manuel Álvarez Bravo explained, at first, the walls of her Mexican studio were “white and clean. Later, she began to write on them phrases from Lenin and Marx ”.
Modotti condenses in an eloquent photograph, Mexican Hat with Hammer and Sickle (1928), the country’s revolutionary imaginary, fusing the aesthetic codes of Bolshevism with indigenous symbols, in a similar way to Rivera’s in the mural Distribution of Arms ( 1926).
Her work evolves from the most abstract forms to social concretion, focusing her gaze on the effort of work and the difficulties of women’s lives. An example of this is the image Zapotec peasant with pitcher on her shoulder (1928), where we can almost feel the heaviness of the voluminous vessel resting on the woman’s shoulder; o Woman’s Hands Washing Clothes (c. 1926), with the contrast between the white clothes and the dark hands that scrub them.
Often, in this series of photographs, Modotti subtly captures the relationship of the worker’s body with the tools, as in Man with Madero (1928), or the products that he must carry to survive, as in the work in which some Indians they transport bales of corn cob leaves to make tamales (1923-1930). The common man’s face is sometimes covered by the beam or the huge leaves. At the end of the day, human beings are reduced, in this task, to a mere “labor force”.
However, in moments of apparent rest, the strength of the expression also emerges, as occurs in Elisa (1924), where we see a woman leaning against a wall, with a lost look that suggests fatigue and a certain disenchantment with life.
Thanks to Rivera and the cartoonist and engraver Xavier Guerrero, Modotti became part of the organization Socorro Rojo Internacional (SRI) and the International Committee for the Defense of the Victims of Fascism; and later, from the Anti-Imperialist League and the Mexican Communist Party (PCM). At this stage, his photographs are published in media such as El Machete, Mexican Folkways or the pro-communist German weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. His house becomes a meeting place for intellectuals, artists and exiles.
When Weston decides to leave Mexico to return to California, he begins a relationship with Guerrero, and later with Juan Antonio Mella, an exiled student who plans to overthrow the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado.
But, as the writer Elena Poniatowska narrates in Tinísima, her novelization of Modotti’s life, everything goes wrong when Mella is murdered on a street in Mexico City before the eyes of the photographer, who, in addition to experiencing such a tragedy, is forced to to defend herself against accusations of being involved in his death. She is also linked, as part of a systematic smear campaign, with an attack on Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio.
Tina goes from being the “beautiful and kind suffragette”, as José M. Peña had defined her a short time ago in an interview for El Sol, to being a persona non grata; allegedly at the center of disturbing conspiracies. As a result, in February 1930 she was arrested and expelled from the country.
He temporarily stops in Rotterdam, but, after fleeing from the fascist police, he arrives in Berlin. At this time, activism gains interest in photography. With his new partner, the Italian communist Vittorio Vidali, he moved to the USSR in the fall of 1930 to work for the SRI. She rejects the option of being an official photographer of the Communist Party, surely because of the verification that there is an “incompatibility between modern experimentalism and the canons of socialist realism”, as Claudio Natoli observes.
He continues with his political work in France, Austria and Spain. In this last destination, she is surprised by the outbreak of the Civil War. Modotti does not hesitate to get involved in solidarity action with the republican struggle and support for the population, contributing to the organization of hospitals or the creation of shelters and adoption centers for orphans or refugees.
In the summer of 1937, he had the opportunity to meet international artists and intellectuals who supported the Republican side, and also to start a friendship with writers such as Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández and Antonio Machado. Her disappointment over the defeat of the Republic or the pact between Stalin and Hitler leads her to abandon active militancy upon her return as a refugee to Mexico.
Modotti will not get to see the anti-fascist alliance or the fall of Nazism, since she died, at just 45 years old, on January 5, 1942, of a heart attack, alone, inside a taxi that circulates through the City of Mexico. Her disappearance provokes heartfelt reactions from poets, artists and political exiles, such as the writer and feminist politician Margarita Nelken or Pablo Neruda, who dedicates the poem Tina Modotti has died to her.
In his verses, Neruda pays homage to his political and artistic commitment in his brief passage through the world: “The new rose is yours, the earth is yours: / you have put on a new suit of deep seed / and your soft silence fills of roots. / You will not sleep in vain, sister.”
