One morning in the mid-90s, the art historian Patricia Albers and her husband drove out to a farm in Oregon, looking for clues that would bring her closer to a woman she had encountered a decade before. She had been perusing an exhibition celebrating the work of California photographer Edward Weston, yet, wandering through the gallery space, it was the photographs of his Italian lover and protege, taken in Mexico in the 1920s, that especially piqued her interest. Who was she, Albers wondered? However, Tina Modotti wasn’t so easy to find. It would take years of detective work for Albers to locate the missing fragments that would bring her subsequent biography, which was published in 1999, to life.
“Modotti lived in eight different countries so it’s hard to fit all the pieces together into a coherent whole,” Albers says from her home in California. That is why her discovery in 1994 of a trunkful of Modotti’s letters and photographs, in a dusty attic in Oregon, was such a pivotal moment. While researching her book, Albers’ sleuthing led her to the family of Modotti’s first partner, the American poet Roubaix “Robo” de L’Abrie Richéy, and to a musty trove that contained more than 100 images by the Italian photographer, mostly small contact prints that had been gifts to Robo’s family. “It was like going through her desk drawers, it had an aroma of the past,” Albers recalls. It also gave her the archival material she needed to finally tell her story.
Some may still regard Modotti as the “It girl of the avant garde”, undoubtedly guided by the bohemian circle of 1920s Mexico City in which she moved, but delve into her life and work and you will uncover a far more complex figure; a socially conscious artist and activist whose output, although cut short at the age of 45, was shaped by some of the most significant historical events of the early 20th century.
“There is a complicity with her subjects because she is working with them and you sense that rapport,” Albers says , looking at a photograph Modotti took in Mexico in 1927 – one of the many “forgotten” images that now reside at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoma). A pair of weather-beaten hands clasp two huddled knees as our gaze travels downward to the elderly man’s battered sandals. Albers is particularly drawn to Modotti’s photographs of working tools, she tells me: a hand on a spade, a fisher throwing a net, the baker boy with a basket on his head. “Those sandals are like tools in themselves,” she muses. “It’s what one needs to make a living.”
This striking image is just one of the nearly 250 that makes up a new retrospective of Modotti’s photography at Barcelona’s Fundación Mapfre, the most extensive exhibition to date, and one that its curator Isabel Tejeda Martín hopes will “break from the iconic figure of the hypersexualised muse”. In other words, moving further away from the “passive model” she was often perceived to be and turning closer towards the “active citizen” she actually was.
The exhibition takes a biographical approach because “it is unavoidable if you want to understand Modotti,” Tejeda Martín says. Born into a working-class family in Udine, in north-east Italy, Modotti emigrated to the US in 1913: first to San Francisco when she was 16, then to Los Angeles in her early 20s, where she became a silent movie actor and modelled for Weston. The inclusion of Weston’s work in this exhibition is important, Tejeda Martín says, “to highlight the differences in their gaze”.
In 1923, she and Weston moved to Mexico City, where Modotti followed Weston’s lead, a biographical detail that often relegates her to “an apprentice” who never broke free from his schooling. Tejeda Martín is determined to change this narrative, a re-examination that is shared by SFMoma’s head of photography Erin O’Toole. “I find that people oversimplify the differences and often it feels very gendered, which I naturally resist,” she says. “Clearly Modotti learned a lot from him, but the influence went back and forth.” So much so that when it comes to their early photography in Mexico, it has sometimes been hard to tell them apart.
Modotti learned quickly. A year after her arrival in the Mexican capital, she became the “official” photographer of the muralists – at the express invitation of its titan, Diego Rivera – taking hundreds of pictures of his first large-scale fresco project at the Secretariat of Public Education. Initially tentative in her approach, it wasn’t until Modotti’s politics deepened that her path peeled away from Weston’s. The pivot, for Albers, occurred in 1927 when she officially joined the Mexican Communist party and “her whole attitude towards photography changed”. One of her most acclaimed pictures, Workers Parade – a geometric sea of wide-brimmed hats – was taken during a May Day demonstration in 1926. “Weston would never do Workers Parade,” Albers says. That’s where the fusion began, mixing “artistic rigour with political power”.
Galvanised by her working-class roots, Modotti moved away from the formalist modernism she had learned, and homed in on the social realities she was observing around her: a child labourer on his lunch break, a woman carrying wood, a man hauling a bale of hay. “I try to produce not art but honest photographs,” Modotti said at the time she was taking them. Tejeda Martín calls it “embodied” photography: “Empathy, for her, is the key concept, it’s in everything she sees.” For instance, a boy defecating in the street (1926-29) brings in questions of dignity: “She cannot forget that she was also a child worker and that it is difficult being in a world like that, exploited by capitalism.” In this sense, she is present on both sides of the camera, because she is equally “the point of view and the scope.”
Her gaze also radically captured the female experience and her photographs of the Indigenous women of Mexico show us how. In the dusty streets of Oaxaca, “everything is carried on the head by the women in Tehuantepec” as a worker’s impassive gaze matches ours under her heavy load. The same year, in 1929, Modotti focused her lens on what the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey later called “the labour of mothering” in a series of images that document the simultaneous intimacy and exertion of breastfeeding. “Women producing the next generation of workers,” as Tejeda Martín calls it.
“When Modotti photographed Indigenous women,” Tejeda Martín writes in the exhibition’s accompanying text, “her vision vindicated the feminine from a labour and social perspective.” No doubt this is why her subsequent revival occurred alongside the second wave of feminist theory in the 1970s. After she died stateless in Mexico, in 1942, Modotti’s work became largely forgotten, her negatives so scattered that many were lost. It would take the efforts of Riccardo Toffoletti, a fellow Udinese photographer, for things to change. In 1973, he recovered and exhibited 30 vintage prints in her home town. Moma responded five years later with a small installation of her work. Then, in the early 1980s, a pioneering exhibition curated by Mulvey and Peter Wollen, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, would bring Modotti face-to-face with another neglected female artist, her friend and comrade, the now exoticised and commodified Frida Kahlo.
So why, then, did Modotti disappear for so long? “I’m loth to go along with the idea that the key reason she fell off the map was because she was a communist,” O’Toole says. “Sure, she was a communist, and in the US after her death there was a lot of fearmongering around communism” – but her story is more complicated than that, she argues. “There are aspects of misogyny there, in that female photographers are less interesting to people.”
After a short spell of only eight years taking photographs, Modotti was expelled from Mexico in 1930 after Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary, was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side (Modotti was arrested before being cleared of the murder). She subsequently gave up photography, although questions linger as to whether this is irrefutably the case. Taking into her consideration her subsequent movements from Berlin, to Moscow, and finally Spain – where she took on a range of political and humanitarian work during the Spanish civil war – perhaps one thing is clear. “She’s hard to pin down,” O’Toole says. “She became an American as far as I can understand, but she spent very little of her life in the US, so is she an American photographer?”
Additionally, there are the rumours about her untimely death. Was it heart failure in the back of a taxi or was Rivera right in suggesting that it was a politically motivated crime? And so the question marks in this extraordinary woman’s story remain. “People continue to be interested in her work in much the same way as Kahlo,” O’Toole says. Because like Kahlo: “Her story keeps the work alive.”
• Tina Modotti is at the Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, until 3 September.
