Tina Modotti

Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, known as Tina Modotti (Udine, August 16, 1896-Mexico City, January 5, 1942), was a photographer Italian, activist and social fighter in Mexico.

Biography

Daughter of Giuseppe Modotti and Assunta Mondini, she had four brothers. At the age of twelve she had to leave school and work in a textile factory to help her family. At the age of seventeen she emigrated to the city of San Francisco. In 1915 she married the poet Roubaix de L'Abrie Richey. She later moved to Hollywood, where she made forays into the field of acting, a recurring activity in Tina's career. In 1921 Tina began a close working relationship with the photographer Edward Weston, with whom she worked as a model and learned photography, marking the beginning of her photographic work.

"Tina Modotti — Laura Mulvey has written — has transformed itself, being an object of beauty used in the art of others, to a professional photographer. As a model, assistant and finally artistic apprentice of Weston, his concept of photography was initially dominated by his aestheticism. Gradually Modotti's work shows the searches of his own leadership and the confidence he was gaining as his political commitment changed his way of seeing the world. Their photographs do not lose their sense of form, but their priorities change."

Between the years 1923-1930 he settled in Mexico, where he carried out most of his work and where he became a revolutionary activist, joining the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. He collaborated with the Mexican Communist Party in 1927.

She became friends with artists such as Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Blanca Luz Brum, Nahui Ollin, María Tereza Montoya, Concha Michel and Frida Kahlo. She was a model and muse for various artists, she posed for the murals of the Chapingo Chapel, painted by Diego Rivera. She actively supported the struggle of Augusto César Sandino and helped found the first Italian anti-fascist committee. She also supported Vittorio Vidali. In 1928 she met Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban student leader, when the committee in support of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti was being formed. Tina and Julio Antonio Mella entered into a loving relationship.

Julio Antonio Mella was murdered on the night of January 10, 1929 on the corner of Abraham González and Morelos, with two shots from a 38 caliber revolver. Mella bled to death in Tina's arms. She was arrested because she was considered that he knew the murderer or was his accomplice. Rallies and marches were organized to demand his release, she received the support and accompaniment of Diego Rivera. Finally, the police decided to discard the statements of three witnesses against Modotti because it was "impossible for some neighbors to have been able to see what they say they saw on Thursday a little after nine, since the moon was very small and low."...", for which she was released without charges. Tina suffered persecution from the Mexican press, who described the murder as a "crime of passion" and they exhibited private documents of both Modotti and Mella.

In February 1930 she was expelled from Mexico. After being rejected by the governments of the United States, Cuba and the Netherlands, she passed through Berlin to finally arrive in Moscow. She organized aid missions for political refugees, which took her to Spain in 1934. During the Spanish Civil War she enlisted in the Fifth Regiment and worked in the International Brigades under the name María. Margarita Nelken, in one of the several praises that are made of her activity, tells how she cared for the children who arrived in Almería after the exodus from Malaga, who were harassed during the journey on foot by the bombings of the forces Francoists.

In 1939 she returned as a refugee, still under the name of María, to Mexico, where she continued her political activity, through the Giuseppe Garibaldi Antifascist Alliance. In 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas annulled her expulsion. She died of a heart attack on January 5, 1942 inside a taxi.

Together with Weston, she was a mentor to the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska wrote a fictionalized biography entitled Tinísima. Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda wrote a play called Tina Modotti.

When Diego Rivera learned of Tina's death, he blamed it on knowing too much about Vidali. Her remains rest in the Civil Pantheon of Dolores, with a portrait of Leopoldo Méndez and an epitaph by Pablo Neruda:

Pure your soft name, pure your fragile life,

bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,

combined with steel, wire and

to create your firm

and delicate being.

Work

The interest that Modotti projected in her works was a reflection of the ideological commitment she had towards the most vulnerable social groups, carrying out her work as editor and photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways and the newspaper El Machete in 1924. This work would lead her to be considered a precursor of critical photojournalism in Mexico, achieving an immediate identification with Mexico and its inhabitants that is reflected in her work.

His work was appreciated by artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, who between the years 1927-1930 entrusted him with the task of photographing their works, whose work represents a certain historical value, because it serves as a document of the realization of the works. works by these two Mexican muralists.

According to Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti had two periods: the romantic one and the revolutionary one. In the first, influenced by Weston, she photographed flowers, objects and architectural details; and the second, emerged in Mexico, from his relationship with the movement of Mexican muralists, in which he portrays the work of these artists, placing emphasis on the details as well as on the workers and the indigenous people. Furthermore, in his work Independently, he captured images of indigenous and mestizos, and documented the social struggle of the less privileged, where the great care in the composition of the scenes stands out, but without forced poses or attitudes. There is a period of transition in which he produced some of his most memorable photos, such as "The hands of a farmer holding a shovel" or "The hands of a washerwoman".

Filmography

He acted in 3 films:

• The Tiger's Coat (1920), drama directed by Roy Clements
• Riding with Death (1921), led by Jacques Jaccard
• I can explain (1922), comedy led by George D. Baker

Appearances in works of fiction

In 1992 the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska published the fictionalized biography Tinísima and with which she won the Mazatlán Prize for literature.

In 2002, the film Frida (2002) was released, directed by Julie Taymor, in which Ashley Judd plays the photographer. A year later, the Spanish comic author Ángel de la Calle published the first volume of the biography Modotti, a woman of the 20th century, the second and final part of which was published in 2007.

In 2019, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the play Tina Modotti premiered. I take you to my country so that they do not touch you, written by Alessandra Battilomo, directed by Daniel Begino and Mica García and performed by Alessandra Battilomo and Luciano Moreno.