In 1923, after starring in a string of silent films, the 26-year-old Italian émigrée Tina Modotti shed her femme fatale persona and decamped for Mexico with her partner, the photographer Edward Weston. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, Weston and Modotti landed in the midst of the country’s cultural renaissance, and while acting as both an apprentice and a muse for Weston, Modotti began working as a photographer in her own right.
She entranced the artists around her. Pablo Neruda, who eulogized her in a poem, wrote in his memoirs of his struggle to capture her essence, likening it to trying to capture fog in his hands. He could recount her face only in vagaries: “A pale oval framed by two black wings of hair, gathered at the back, and huge velvety eyes that go on watching the years.” Diego Rivera drew her in soft black chalk and asked her to photograph his murals. In the 1990s, Madonna signed on to portray Modotti after wrapping Evita, but the film never materialized.
A new exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, “Tina Modotti: The Eye of the Revolution,” pulls Modotti and her work out of obscurity. Having been radicalized by the poverty she encountered, Modotti focused her camera on women and workers, determined to give a face to the impoverished. More than 200 of these century-old prints are on display.
“[It’s] not only the female gaze, it’s a class-conscious gaze,” says the exhibition’s curator, Isabel Tejeda, who began researching Modotti in the 1990s while working on a project about female artists. Tejeda thinks that the suppression of Modotti from the canons of art history—she never achieved the same level of fame that Weston did—is not merely due to being a female photographer but is also politically motivated, as Modotti became a Communist, in 1927. “A Communist was a devil,” says Tejeda of the public sentiment at the time. “She was a persona non grata.”
Modotti’s politics are inextricable from her photography. In Sickle, Bandolier, Guitar (1927), for instance, we see the three items positioned together in languorous harmony. Other images are less overt but no less powerful. One of her most clearly modernist works, Construction Worker, Mexico City (1927), shows a laborer carrying a rough wood beam on his shoulder, his head completely obscured. The intersection of the vertical body weighed down by the horizontal beam recalls the Via Dolorosa (Way of Suffering). In other words, Christ carrying the cross.
“I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations,” Modotti wrote in a photography magazine in the late 1920s. Tejeda, however, says it would be incorrect to label her a photojournalist. Aesthetics always came first: Modotti’s framing is careful and considered, never the product of a quick capture.
Though she lived too short a life—Modotti is said to have died of heart failure at 45, though many suspected she was assassinated—the importance of her work as a photographer, a nonconformist, and a revolutionary is eternal. As Neruda wrote in a poem mourning her death, “You will never sleep in vain, o sister of mine / … For the fire dies not.”
“Tina Modotti: The Eye of the Revolution” opens at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, on February 13
Christina Cacouris is a Paris-based writer and curator
