Tina Modotti - Edward Weston - photographers

TINA MODOTTI

 EDWARD WESTON

A Master by another

I adored the work of Edward Weston but it also introduced me to the work of some women who's work I went on to admire at least as much. Not least because of the interest by my dear and much missed colleague at MOMA in Oxford, the then Director's assistant, who went on to curatorship herself, Carol Brown, whose interest in artists like Frida Kahlo and cohorts was an education to me. One of these figures was the legendary and extraordinary figure of Tina Modotti

Edward Weston with his plate camera by Tina Modotti

Modotti was friends with Weston and his wife although was soon to become the former's mistress. She befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and in her short life blazed with political awareness  and had an equally vibrant life. The role of mistress was never to suite and she quickly stepped out from under Weston's control and influence. 

Tina Modotti - Walter Lipmann

Tina Modotti

Friends - Kahlo and Chavela Vargas by Modotti

Modotti by Weston

“What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography,” she once explained. “By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers.” 

Born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini on August 16, 1896 in Udine, Italy, she emigrated to the United States in 1913 to live with her father in San Francisco. Modotti became involved in acting in Los Angeles during the early 1920s, and entered the circles of several artists meeting Trotsky, Sergie Eisenstein and others . In 1923, Modotti and Weston set out for Mexico City, established a photography studio upon arriving, and subsequently joined the Communist Party. Though Weston later returned to his wife in California, Modotti stayed in Mexico and became more involved in radical politics before being exiled in 1931. She stopped producing photographs after this time and in 1939 returned to Mexico under a false name. The artist died on January 4, 1942 in Mexico City, Mexico of congestive heart failure. She was 45

Her work was largely unknown until the 1990s, when a cache of her remarkable photographs was discovered in an Oregon farmhouse. Long overshadowed by her extraordinary life and her relationship with Edward Weston, she was viewed as his muse, rather than as a gifted photographer in her own right. Despite a remarkably short career in photography - just seven years - she created a body of iconic images that confirmed her place in history. By fusing rigorous formalism with a desire to effect social change, she reconceived revolutionary photography through the language of modernism. Her work is now a touchstone in the history of photography, reflecting equally the tenets of modernist photography and the experience of post-revolutionary Mexico. Modotti's photographs continue to inspire many, including many women and activists interested in making a socially and politically relevant art.

by Modotti

Calla Lillies - Tina Modotti

Calla Lily - Modotti 1924-26

TINA MODOTTI

(dedicated to the memory of Carol Brown my colleague from MOMAO and arts administrator par excellence who introduced me to Modotti)

Until her sudden – and some say mysterious – death at 45, the Italian-born artist lived an extraordinary life, morphing from silent-film actress to model, muse, photographer, Mexican revolutionary and (possibly) spy. Yet it wasn’t until the 1990s – when a cache of her photographs was discovered in a farmhouse in Oregon and several platinum prints, Roses and Calla Lilies, were auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York – that her own photographic legacy and incredible story would come to light

This from MOMA New York:

Tina Modotti’s photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She acted in plays and silent films, and worked as an artist’s model during her first years in the country. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and was a great influence on her subsequent work. By 1921 they had become lovers, and in 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city. 

With her camera, Modotti captured Mexico’s sights and people. She took its folk art and landscapes as the starting points for her most abstract images. Telephone Wires, Mexico isolates taut stretches of wire against a pale sky, finding gridded linearity in the skyscape. Staircase and Stadium, Mexico City record repetitions of stairs and shadows, creating complex images that push these architectural features toward abstraction. 

Modotti’s social concerns emerge in photographs such as Worker’s Hands, a quiet celebration of a laborer’s dignity. Mella’s Typewriter reveals her leftist leanings and carries a subtle social heft. Modotti met Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary who was a hero among other Latin American radicals, in 1928, at a demonstration in Mexico City against the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The following year, Mella was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side. Her photograph of his typewriter, his instrument for recording his beliefs, is a symbolic portrait of Mella’s life and work, and an emblem of her own Communist sympathies—which ultimately led to her exile from Mexico in 1930. 

Modotti eventually settled in Moscow, where she joined the Soviet Communist Party. She gave up photography completely in 1931 to dedicate herself to political work. When she died in 1942 from congestive heart failure, she left behind a small but intensely influential body of work that reflects her appreciation for the Mexican working class, filtered through the precise formal vocabulary of her photographic practice. Introduction by Kelly Sidley, Curatorial Assistant, MOMA NY, Department of Photography, 2016

Frida Kahlo and Tina fooling around

Tina Modotti by Edward Weston - double portrait