Review Summary: Tina Modotti achieved a remarkable level of accomplishment in a photographic career that spanned merely 7 years and 250 images. Her work captures many of the best elements of the compositional skills of Edward Weston, her mentor and lover, while adding a heart-felt attraction for people that Mr. Weston's work lacked. These images of portraits, still lifes, and architecture from her years in Mexico are much more appealing to me than Mr. Weston's are from the same period. The extensive biographical essay also corrects many misconceptions about Ms. Modotti's life.Reader Warning: This book contains some partial female nudity, mostly of women nursing their babies.
Review: "Tina Modotti is the best-known unknown photographer of the twentieth century . . . ." Her work exhibits "extraordinary formal clarity coupled with incisive social content." Her style obviously was influenced by Edward Weston, due to their long association and personal closeness. Other influences include the Movimento Estridentista (the Mexican reaction to Futurism), New Vision, and the German Arbeiter-Fotograf movement. The vision is uniquely hers.
My assumption is that you have never seen her work. I certainly never had. Ms. Modotti's images are a nice surprise. Often books that make these kinds of claims about their subject don't have the content to support them. This one does live up to its bold premise about her photography. Of her own work, Ms. Modotti observed that her purpose was "to produce not art but honest photographs." All of her images are contact prints, and her technique shows the minimum of trying to provide eye candy. What they do show is a wonderful eye for the interesting and heart-warming. You will have a much more emotional reaction to these images than to the photographs of many outstanding photographers, a group in which Ms. Modotti belongs.
Relatively unschooled in a formal sense, she was an emotionally-based Communist. Some may not appreciate the political content of some of her images, such as the various ways of portraying the hammer and sickle symbol of the Soviet Union. I thought that these photographs were among the least interesting of her works.
Her life history was an interesting surprise to me. Coming from a poor family in Italy, she appears to have pulled herself up by the bootstraps as a seamstress. First working in garment factories, she probably became a costume seamstress and from there launched her performing career as an actress and model. Often portrayed as the lover and friend of various famous men, she probably viewed them as an appendage to her. History has been successfully revised in the excellent biographical sketch in this book.
My favorite images in the book include:
Edward Weston, 1924; Open Doors, c. 1925; Staircase, c. 1924-26; Convent of Tepotzotlan (Stairs Through Arches), 1924; Geranium, c. 1924-25; Easter Lily and Bud, c. 1925; Interior of Church, 1924; Elisa Kneeling, 1924; Carelton Beals, 1924; Portrait of a Woman, c. 1926-29; Federico Marin, 1926; Ione Robinson, 1929; Two Children or Boys from Colonia del la Bolsa, c. 1927-28; Hands Resting on Tool, 1927; Woman with Flag, 1928; Techuantepec Type (Woman Smiling), c. 1929; and Young Pioneers, 1930.
The images for the first two or three years could easily have been done by Edward Weston, but show a connection to daily living that his more ethereal works do not display. After that, the works definitely separate in content, style, and focus. If you like Mr. Weston's work, you may enjoy comparing his Mexican images with hers.
After producing all but a few of these photographs, Ms. Modotti left Mexico for Russia and eventually played an important role in the Spanish Civil War in evacuating children and as a nurse. All of those parts of her life are recounted in the book's biographical essay.
After you enjoy these uplifting views of the nobility of people, nature, and of human efforts, I suggest that you think about what you convey about these subjects to your children or grandchildren. Do they know what your views are and why you hold them? If not, you might consider taking photographs and writing notes to go with them to help share your vision of the world. Whether they agree or not, you will enrich them in important ways.
Seek out the best in every situation!
