Paris has dedicated a retrospective to Tina Modotti, the photographer of post-revolutionary Mexico

First Amendment: 02/13/2024 – 17:15Last update: 02/13/2024 – 17:13

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The exhibition, which includes 240 black and white photographs, and is scheduled to continue until next May, covers five stages in the life of this artist, who was born into a humble family in Udine, northeastern Italy, in 1896.

In 1913, Tina Modotti immigrated to the West Coast of the United States, where she worked in a textile mill.

She later worked as a model and film and stage actress before becoming the partner of photographer Edward Weston.

“She stood before him starting in 1920, before convincing him to travel to post-revolutionary Mexico and stay for a certain period,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Isabel Tejeda Martín.

Weston “would give him his first camera in exchange for his work in the photographic studio and at home” before returning alone to the United States at the end of 1926.

Titled “Eye of Revolution” and promoted with a poster of his famous shot “Woman Carrying a Flag” (1927), the exhibition aims “to display his photographs side by side, revealing Modotti’s great modernism” in either still life or still life. Architectural photographs or portraits, says the curator.

“Artistic Renaissance” in Mexico

She explains that during her years in Mexico, the artist “experienced what we call the country’s artistic and cultural ‘renaissance’ and became an indispensable figure who would change photography.”

“It will provide a look full of empathy, which will change photography, condemning social injustice in a very personal way” with street scenes, demonstrations or landless peasants, says Tejeda Martin.

Tina Modotti also documents the work of artists such as José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, whose wife Frida Kahlo became a friend.

Because of her increasing political involvement, photographs of Modotti appeared during her lifetime in numerous communist publications in the United States, Europe, Germany, and the Soviet Union.

After joining the Communist Party in 1927, he joined the International Red Relief (the Communist equivalent of the Red Cross) and collaborated with the newspaper “El Machete”, which targeted the peasant population who read it pinned on the walls because they could not afford it. He. She.

Symbolism and symbolism

Although he sometimes used photomontage, he declared in a statement that he sought “not to produce art, but to produce honest images without resorting to artifice or subterfuge.”

His style, which would characterize his Mexican counterparts such as Manuel Álvarez or Graciela Iturbide, develops towards “symbolism, as when he tries to show the entire peasant world through people wearing hats depicted from above, as if it were a sea, and symbolism.” “, with images of cobs, cartridge belts and lyres as well as the hammer and sickle,” explains the commissioner.

In 1930, Modotti was expelled from Mexico after being wrongly accused of participating in an attack against President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, but she was able to return to the country, where she died in 1942.

She briefly passed through Berlin and then went to the Soviet Union, where the Communist Party decided to send her to Republican Spain.

In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 he participated in the Second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona alongside Octavio Paz, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Capa, Alexei Tolstoy, André Malraux and Anna Seghers. .

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