Tina Modotti: The Eye of Revolution
Tina Modotti. Hands of Marionette Player, 1929.
Tina Modotti. Baby Nursing, c. 1926-27.
Tina Modotti. Worker's Hands, 1927.
The thing that always strikes me about Tina Modotti’s work is the hands. They are the focus of many of her photographs and they have come to be emblematic of the themes of revolution, violence, tradition and labor, most prominent in her body of work. It can seem strange, this focus away from the face, the eyes, the windows to all souls, and down, down, to this: a pair of rope-veined hands wrapped with black string in Hands of Marionette Player, 1929. Or this: the small, puckish hands of a child nursing on a mother’s breast in Baby Nursing, c. 1926-27. Or even this: a pair of clasped hands curling around the dusty handle of a trowel in Worker’s Hands, 1927. Hands adorn Modotti’s compositions, holding revolutionary newspapers, cupping soft, dark skin, manipulating inanimate wooden bodies, and making them come to life before our very eyes.
I recall a line by Patti Smith, in Year of the Monkey, ‘all is but an intermission, of small and tender consequence’ [1] and I think about these photographs. Tina Modotti’s tender hands, waiting in a moment of stillness, captured forever.
Of course, this intermission was marked by much more than a quiet, contemplative moment.
Born into a working-class family in Udine, Northern Italy, in 1896, Modotti was surrounded by the socialist politics of her modest upbringing. When she was a teenager, her family emigrated to San Francisco, where she sought work in a textile factory. Beautiful and longing for elsewhere, she would not think to pick up a camera until she meets photographer, Edward Weston, in 1920 and the two become lovers. It will be three years later when the two move to Mexico City, to open a photography studio. It will be there, in Mexico, where Modotti will become a photographer in her own right.
The year was 1923 and Mexico was in the eye of a revolution. After the overthrowing of the ancient regime in 1911, a decade of civil war was to bring about great social change and political upheaval. Cruelty had been pushed to the brink and a population of workers were rising up against the oppressive forces of wealthy landowners and industrialists capitalizing on exploitative practices. It was here that Modotti first put her eye to the lens and started a revolution of her own.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the international circle of dispatched bohemian intellectuals stretched wide in Mexico. Modotti photographed everything, and soon her work was being circulated in socialist magazines and newspapers. Her commitment to social and political subjects gave her photographs a subtle and temporal power. These images were abstract and complex. Rather than document the current political situation in extravagant terms, Modotti captured the precise and specific of the everyday. She worked externally, capturing the condition of the Mexican people in public spaces. Petrol tanks, construction work, telephone wires. Flowers, sickels, kernels of corn. Her emblematic rather than documentary style lends itself to a clarity and precision which underlines the political context. There is a constructivist element to her photographs. A practiced geometry inherited from Weston, yet undeniably transformed into something entirely her own.
Surrounded by intellectuals and artists, like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Modotti provided a visual testimony of everyday life in Mexico. More than just a photographer of the elite, Modotti ventured out to seek different Mexican communities whose realities she documented, free of the ordained lens of Modernism.
Modotti is quoted in the 1929 publication of Mexican Folkways: ‘In reality, what I try to produce is not art, but honest photography, without tricks or manipulations’. [2] This break away from photography as art, as a purely aesthetic practice, allowed Modotti to develop a social sensitivity to the lives she was documenting. Her desire for an ‘honest photography’ echoes the social importance of photography as a democratized form of mass media, able to spread messages and ideas. In her carefully composed still-life portraits, such as Bandolier, Corn, Sickle, 1927, or Canana, sickle and guitar, 1927, Modotti imbues objects with the signs of revolution. The formality of these still-life images creates a politics of symbols that functions to underscore the metaphorical union of the artist, the working-class laborer, and the militant. A female gaze. A communist image. A symbol of the Mexican Revolution.
Modotti, like her friend and fellow artist Frida Kahlo, was inspired by the renewed artistic interest in Mexicanidad, which took inspiration from indigenous Mexican cultures. The women of Tehuantepec exemplify the influence of Mexicanidad. While Frida Kahlo famously adopted the traditional embroidered garments of this matriarchal community, Modotti traveled to Tehuantepec to photograph the women’s everyday lives. Woman with Jicara on her head, 1929, is an emblematic portrait, signifying simultaneously the strength of the female matriarch and the strength of the Mexican indigenous identity. She dominates the frame and is portrayed in statuesque terms, like a warrior or a mythological hero. As Sarah Lowe stated, ‘Modotti uses the Tahuana to make a powerful political point: that women were capable of independent political action.’ [3]
A woman, an artist, and a member of the Mexican Communist party, Modotti very soon became a major subject of political persecution. In 1930, the revolution was suppressed. Communism was a dangerous line to tread once Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and outspoken political activists were being targeted. Modotti was among the persecuted. That year, a string of deaths paraded the streets. Julio Antonio Mella, Cuban revolutionary and Modotti’s lover, was assassinated. Attempts were made on the life of Pascual Ortiz Rubio, the newly instated president. Modotti was accused of having a hand to play and was expelled from Mexico. Threat of fascism was rising in Mussolini’s Italy and she could not go back to her birth country. She went instead to Berlin, and then to Moscow, and then, upon the outbreak of civil war, she went to Spain to fight against Franco, before finally returning to Mexico.
Tina Modotti died in Mexico in 1942. She died stateless, in a place she had spent all her artistic years fighting for and capturing, yet a place which would not claim her. The state, perhaps, had exiled her, but the people had not. Now, she is claimed as their own. Pablo Neruda wrote a poem in memoriam, ‘Tina Modotti is Dead’, celebrating her ferocity and commitment to Mexico and its people:
‘They are your people, sister: those who today speak your name,
we who from everywhere, from the water and the land,
with your name leave unspoken and speak other names.
Because fire does not die.’ [4]
Tina Modotti’s life was lived through the lens of revolution. Her political beliefs fueled her photography, and her photographs are what remains. They are tender and they are strong. They capture the fraught and symbiotic relationship between art and politics, between everyday life and systems of rebellion. There is a fire behind her eyes, burning inside of her, and it is an effervescent flame in the center of her work. It survives beyond her because, as Neruda wrote, the words carved on her headstone, ‘fire does not die’.
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Works Cited
[1] Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
[2] Tina Modotti quoted in “On Photography,” Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1929, reprinted in Robert Miller, Tina Modotti, and Spencer Throckmorton, Tina Modotti : Photographs (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1997).
[3] Sarah Lowe, Tina Modotti: Photographs, (New York: Abrams, 1995).
[4] Pablo Neruda, Tina Modotti is Dead, (1942).
Tina Modotti, Bandolier, Corn, Sickle, 1927.
Tina Modotti, Canana, sickle and guitar, 1927.
Tina Modotti, Woman with Jicara on her head, 1929, Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico.