photos from the edge 43 - TINA MODOTTI, PHOTOGRAPHER AND REVOLUTIONARY
By David Bacon
Thanks to Brad Sigal's Get the Picture Podcast for excerpting this from a longer interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfCDPh-KoRo
All photos by Tina Modotti except the last.
Tina Modotti came from Udine, in northern Italy, and grew up in San Francisco's North Beach. Interested in drama, she acted in community productions and then, in the 1920s, went to Hollywood. There she met Edward Weston, one of the founders of modernism in photography. Together they traveled to Mexico City.
Weston taught Modotti the fundamentals of photography of that era - plate and sheet film cameras, the darkroom, and a very hands-on method of creating photographs. He was a master, and he taught her the craft. During those years, though, she quickly became very politicized. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, and became friends with Mexico's revolutionaries.
Her photographs were compelling. Both she and Weston explored a clear realist (even materialist) vision - modernism at its very beginning. Then she parted ways with him, and applied that vision to the politics of revolutionary Mexico. By doing so, she produced images that made a crucial contribution to the development of socially committed photography.
Yet it is the trajectory of her life itself - her relationship to the revolutionary movements in Mexico and beyond - that asks us to consider the balance between art and politics. In the 1920s the revolution had just taken power. She and her political and artist comrades were exploring all the ways in which the arts could be used to push forward the goals of revolution.
It was the era of the great muralists - Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco. They were painting the walls of Mexico City with brilliant images, showing what the past had truly been in real terms, and what the future held for people because of the upheaval and its profound changes. She began to use her photography in the same way, very consciously, to spread the new ideology.
The Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union was taking place at the same time. She began to mix the symbols of communism and the Russian revolution with the symbols of the Mexican Revolution. In one series of photographs, she takes the hammer and sickle, the Soviet symbol, and Mexicanizes it by adding Mexican elements. She adds first the sombrero, then the cartridge belt, symbol of the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, and the ear of corn, what the peasant rebellion was really all about. Finally the guitar replaces the sickle.
She's doing this with the intention of creating, through photographs, symbols that people can rally around, as part of Mexico's social transformation. But she's also trying to establish, in the minds of the ordinary people who will view these photographs, that the two revolutions have something in common. They are the movements of the working people, and by extension, not just in Mexico CIty and Moscow, but everywhere.
Then she tries to show in another way what revolution means, and makes a photograph that foreshadows those that will be created by revolutionaries from then on, from China to Cuba to Vietnam. To survive, all revolutions have to mobilize their base - in Mexico, the campesinos and the workers. To involve them, a revolutionary process first has to teach people to read, and then it must provide newspapers, books and reading materials that explain its goals.
Modotti creates a photograph of a group of people in sombreros and work clothes, gathered around, reading an issue of El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party. The photograph is a way of saying that people are becoming literate, they are becoming involved. The revolution is producing materials for them to read so they can participate effectively, and the photograph shows that process. It is not a neutral document. It is very partisan, urging the workers to participate, to learn to read and to be part of changing their own world.
She was skilled at creating photographs that combined emotional power with a clear political agenda. Work worn hands on a shovel clearly state the importance of documenting those who make the revolution. As depression-era photographers did in the U.S., she juxtaposes a sign advertising the illusion of wealth with the gritty reality of a poor man sleeping on a sidewalk. A huge crowd moves through one image - the power of massed people. A rural hacienda, even after the revolution's gains, still shows the class division between the well-dressed hacendado and a family of peones. She took photographs of workers in the tropics, and of the indigenous women who were Mexico's true majority and revolution's most important subjects.
Modotti used the modernist approach - the simplicity of these photographs and their directness - to move the revolution forward. She was so much a partisan that the Mexican government, as it turned conservative, deported her for her revolutionary activity. The last of her photographs that we know of were taken shortly afterwards, as she traveled through Berlin and on to Moscow. It was then that she decided there were things in life more important than photography.
She went to work for the Communist International, and it sent her to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She took charge of the relief efforts of the Socorro Rojo, the Red Aid. She worked without pause or rest to meet people's critical needs as Madrid was bombed by Nazi and Italian planes, while the defenders of the Republic struggled desperately to survive and continue fighting. Then, when the fascists won, she helped to get thousands of people out of Spain as refugees. She went back to Mexico after the civil war was over, and died there of exhaustion.
Her life shows clear choices, in the way she saw the relationship between politics and photography. Her view contradicts capitalist notions of art, that say to photographers and artists, "the most important thing in life for you is your art. You must be passionate about your individual life above all else." Modotti would have said, that's a very bourgeois idea, because what's really important is changing the world. There are times when those things needed for change - revolution as she saw it - are more important than photography even. And she acted on that.
Her life is particularly important to us today. It says to photographers and artists, yes, you have to think about the purpose of your art, and how it's going to be integrated into social movements. But Modotti also demands that you ask yourself, very honestly, is your art the most important thing in the world that you should be doing with your life, right now?
Most of the time we would answer yes. We have a role to play. Acknowledging art's function in social movements and acting on it, as she did herself in one period of her life, is very important. But, Modotti also would have said, don't forget what the end goal is. The end goal is social transformation. Sometimes its demands are transcendent, and they were with her.
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