Tina Modotti :: Essays Papers

Tina ModottiEven though Tina Modotti is considered a Mexican pictureer because her fastidious career was mostly based in Mexico and the American Southwest, she was born in Undine, Italy in 1896. She moved to California in 1913 and was employed in conglomerate labor-intensive factory jobs. She was first known mainly because of her relationship with scooter Edward Weston, for whom she was a model in the 1920s but her abstract, portrait, and still-life photographs showed her to be an consummate photographer in her own right (encyclopedia). In the 1920s, Modotti was active with Mexican revolutionaries, joining the Mexican Communist Party, and having close connections with the Mexican Artists Union. When her lover, Cuban subversive Julio Antonio Mella, was found murdered in 1928, she was accused but acquitted of complicity in his murder (encyclopedia). Modotti was eventually deported to Berlin because of her revolutionary ties when there was an assassination attempt on the Mex ican president Pascal Ortiz Rubio. From Berlin, she moved to Moscow in 1931 and deserted photography temporarily in favor of revolutionary causes there. She also lived in France and Spain before returning to Mexico clandestinely in 1939. When back in Mexico, she continued photography and political work until her death of a heart attack in 1942 (encyclopedia). Most of her surviving famous photographs were from her period in Mexico between 1923 and 1926. The photograph entitled Staircase, 1925 is a good example of an abstract architectural image. motif features in this work include the use of repetition of a define pattern, and perspective. It is a picture of space becoming a pattern a construction of lines and triangles stretched very tightly towards two dimensions in which depth is two precisely described and subtly denied (Szarkowski). It bears a resemblance to the drawings of M.C. Escher, where the eye is tricked into perceive an impossibly three-dimensional object. Here, an obviously three-dimensional subject is shortened to depend flat, due to the lack of contrast between near and far distances.The photograph Flor de Manita, 1925 shows great equity between figure and ground shapes. It is a give that has large sweeping curves, but because of the darkness of the subject and the lightness of the background, if viewed from a distance, the nature of the subject is obscured and one sees only white and black shapes that harmoniously coexist with one another.