With her beauty, her incredible life spent between Europe, the United States and Mexico in the troubled period between the wars, Tina Modotti (1896-1942) provided the material for many fantasies. “The problem is that his life has been far too romanticized,” summarizes Isabel Tejeda, curator of the major exhibition dedicated to the Italian photographer by Jeu de Paume, in Paris.
In biographies and articles, Tina Modotti was sometimes portrayed as a fatal beauty, a muse immortalized in sensual nudes by the American photographer Edward Weston, sometimes as a secret agent, a communist Mata-Hari in the pay of Stalin. With nearly two hundred and forty prints and a number of documents, the Jeu de Paume takes stock of the work and career of a woman who crossed photography like a comet, for only seven years, and who made her images a political tool in Mexico in the 1920s.
Tina Modotti grew up in a modest environment, and her working-class origins certainly influenced her choices and commitments. Born to a seamstress and a mechanic in Udine, Italy, the young girl arrived alone in the United States at 16, to join her father in San Francisco. In this California conducive to all dreams, she tried her luck in Hollywood, and immersed herself in the bohemian and artistic world.
It was there that she met Edward Weston, champion of modernist photography: she became his model and his lover, posing for him in nudes and portraits where her dark beauty radiated, while he taught her his art. Fascinated by Mexico, in full political and cultural ferment after the revolution, she convinced Weston to settle there and open a studio with her in 1923.
Official photographer of the muralists
Thus begins her most fruitful period for Tina Modotti. Following in Weston’s footsteps, she began by creating sophisticated portraits, architecture with clean lines, and still lifes. But, unlike her mentor, the young woman is more concerned with humans than with formal perfection: in her female portraits, motherhood interests her more than the curves of the nude, personality more than the material of a dress. After a while, she abandoned the heavy camera with tripod offered by her companion to adopt a Graflex, smaller and more manageable, therefore more appropriate for bearing witness to the lives of people in the street.
While Weston returns to the United States, Tina Modotti puts down roots in the country whose culture she extols. For a book by the anthropologist Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars, she photographs popular traditions, pre-Hispanic and colonial art, but also the work of contemporary artists who seek to create a new Mexican identity. She became the official photographer for muralists like Diego Rivera or José Clemente Orozco – it was her work that made this movement known in the United States.
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