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| Tina Modotti 1924, by Edward Weston |
As a young immigrant to the United States, Tina lived in San
Francisco and then in Los Angeles, becoming involved in film and meeting Edward
Weston, who financed his photography with a portraiture business. Tina became
his favorite model. When Tina decided to move to Mexico, Weston left his family
(though taking his eldest son with him) and went with her. Tina apprenticed
herself to Weston, learning photography and print-making, and in return,
managed the studio they opened in Mexico City.
Mexico was in a cultural renaissance and Weston’s photos of
Tina were published ahead of their arrival. They were welcomed everywhere.
Their friends included the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco
and many others. Tina’s photographs (made with the large format cameras Weston
favored) began to be published and shown alongside Weston’s. She became the
favorite documentation photographer for the muralists. Rivera met Frieda Kahlo
at one of Tina’s parties.
“Tina had become increasingly idealistic and was moving
towards a deeper commitment to revolutionary art and politics,” writes her
biographer Margaret Hooks in Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary.
The great love between Weston and Tina eroded due to jealousy. Both of them
took lovers as they pleased. When Weston returned to California in 1926, Tina
took an apartment which became a center for local communist leaders and
political exiles. She also began to photograph social injustice, political
rallies, workers and the poor.
In 1927, Tina became a member of the communist party. She
was involved with Xavier Guerrero and the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella whose
assassination was never solved. A student who knew her at the time writes: “She
was a free woman; I mean, she did not have the usual limitations that women in
Mexico had. She was very intelligent and quick to express herself, a rapid
thinker … extroverted and very sure of herself. What immediately attracted you
to her was her great human empathy.” As the political stew thickened around
her, she was estranged from Diego Rivera because of politics. She became the
victim of sensationalist journalism and police surveillance. In 1930 she was
arrested and deported to Europe.
In Europe, Tina was no longer able to support herself with
photography. She worked for communist aid organizations and went to Moscow with
the nefarious Italian operative Vittorio Vidali. In Moscow, she gave up her
camera and photographic work. During the Spanish Civil War, she was in Spain,
working in hospitals, sometimes in disguise, for the Republicans. As Spain fell
to the Fascists, Tina joined a wave of refugees crossing the Pyrenees into
France with no more than the clothes on her back.
When Tina tried to land in New York in 1939, her sister
waiting for her, she was turned away. Immigration officials were reluctant to
let in Spanish refugees and insisted Tina continue on to Mexico. She traveled
under an assumed name, but was terrified Mexico would not take her back. She
did get back in to Mexico, however, and spent her time working with aid
organizations for the Spanish refugees. Her health grew poor and she stayed
home more, typing and translating. She died in a taxi of heart failure three
years later.
I first learned about Tina from the Daybooks of
Edward Weston. The work Weston did in Mexico depended upon Tina’s friendships
and language abilities but when he left Tina in Mexico, I lost track of this
intriguing, mysterious woman. In Margaret Hooks’ above-mentioned book the rest
of the story is told. The book is filled with portraits of her by Weston as
well as her own most famous photographs.
Modotti’s work is the complement of Edward Weston’s. She
said at one point, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the
problem of art.” Weston had said the opposite. Her epitaph was written by Pablo
Neruda:
“Pure your gentle name, pure
your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow,
silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.”
