Tina Modotti: Photographs

by Sarah M. Lowe, Tina Modotti (Photographer), Anne d'Harnoncourt (Contributor)

The first serious art-historical study of the photographic achievement of Tina Modotti (1896-1942). Modotti's photographic career spanned a brief but intense seven years (1923-30) when she lived in Mexico and became committed to revolutionary Communism. The beautifully reproduced duotone images in this book include portraits, still lifes (among them, Modotti's memorable "revolutionary icons" incorporating an ear of dried corn, a bandolier, a sickle, and a guitar), Mexican workers, folk art, street photographs, architectural studies, and flowers and plants. They have been selected to represent the full range of Modotti's esthetic imagination, and nearly half have rarely or never been reproduced before.

In an informative biographical and critical essay based on exhaustive research, Sarah M. Lowe, curator, art historian, author of a book about Frida Kahlo, and contributor to Abrams' The Diary of Frida Kahlo, explores the forces that shaped Modotti's early family influences in Italy; her formative experiences in the bohemian communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1910s; the relationship with legendary American photographer Edward Weston that provided her with her first photographic training; and the artistic and political circles she entered in Mexico. Lowe casts new light on Modotti's Mexican years, describing her relationships with a constellation of powerful artists, critics, activists, and journalists.

Tina Modotti: Photographs is the catalogue of the first comprehensive exhibition of Modotti's work, organized on the occasion of the centennial of her birth by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1995

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

(MOVIE, The tiger's coat)

[lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uitstekend boek over het indrukwekkende leven van fotografe en politiek activiste Tina Modotti. Bevat een boeiende studie van haar leven, die na een periode in de VS als actrice in dienst ging staan van de fotografie en de communistische beweging in Mexico. Veel fraaie afdrukken zijn er in opgenomen: van modernistische planten stillevens tot aan haar sobere maar krachtige, activistische werk.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tina Modotti has been one of my favorite artists ever since I was introduced to her work when the exhibit that accompanied this book toured SFMOMA years ago. The images reproduced here do her as much justice as any reproduction can (though I highly recommend seeing the originals if you ever have the opportunity). Lowe's accompanying article-length text, though sometimes a bit dense for those of us not initiated into the nuances of political communism in the early 20th century, highlights how this one artist strove to naturally combine her political worldview with her need, desire, and talent for aesthetic communication. It is interesting, if somewhat necessarily sparse. Frustratingly, due to the fact that Modotti was a woman living and traveling in circles dominated by "significant" men, a very limited amount seems to be really known about Modotti herself. A few letters, mostly to those men important to her, reveal a limited amount of her thought, but repeatedly Lowe is forced to resort to supposing and guessing what may have motivated Modotti, rather than being able to report her actual thoughts. The chronicle of her movements, relationships, exiles, and imprisonments, however, does help add a breadth and context to the viewing experience of the photographs; I feel a deeper and richer appreciation of Modotti's art for having read it.

[Chanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent study on Tina Modotti, her art making, and post-revolutionary Mexico. This book is as rich for her photographs as it is in giving the reader context of the inextricable link between art and social consciousness/political organizing in Mexico in the 1920s/early 1930s.