Tina modotti photographer biography template

Edam was embarking on its thirty-fourth Transatlantic return voyage under the command of a Dutch captain named Jochems. Tina and her two fellow deportees, Johann Windisch and Isaak Abramovich Rosenblum, were booked into third-class cabins. Right away she was disheartened to learn that the journey would take six weeks. But the man who boarded the Edam was not Hurwitz.

It was another young man, stockily built, with coarse features and a receding hairline, who should have been immediately recognisable to Tina. Had he not been so well disguised, she would have known right away that it was in fact her Communist mentor and fellow Italian Vittorio Vidali. The ubiquitous sombrero would have been immediately recognizable to the Mexican viewer for its connection to the campesinos and trabajadores, the Mexican workers, who were gathered for the annual May Day parade in Mexico City.

May Day, traditionally celebrated on the first of May, commemorates International Workers' Day, often with large parades and gatherings as a demonstration of solidarity among workers. This was a calendar event that Modotti had been familiar with since childhood due to her father's involvement in these very same parades. Among Modotti's earliest politically motivated photographs, Workers Parade brings together her formal concerns with her interest in using art to express her political beliefs and her desire to make her photography socially relevant.

On a symbolic level, as noted by Sarah Lowe, Worker's Parade conveys the power of unity by "suggesting that the source of power to make political changes lies with the peasants. A carefully composed photograph of a bandolier, an ear of corn, and a sickle, married Modotti's interest in the photographic still life with objects symbolic of Mexico and the revolution - the sickle, a popular Communist symbol, corn, a symbol of Mexico and its rural farmers, and the bandolier a pocketed belt for holding ammunitionthe symbol of the Mexican Revolution.

Due to her Communist-inflected worldview, her photographs from the late s took a decided turn toward Communist symbolism, in lieu of overt propaganda. As Sarah Lowe has stated, "her eloquent arrangements - founded on a stringent formal control - relocates the commonplace into the realm of the symbolic. They become potent revolutionary icons, offering a metaphorical union of artista [artist], campesino [farm laborer], and soldado [soldier], thus functioning as both formal still life and propaganda.

In this respect, Modotti's relationship with Frida Kahlo becomes more than a shared friendship, and also incorporates shared artistic practice. Kahlo also infused still-lives with political objects and slogans, and as such transforms a seemingly domestic process of making art into a highly charged political statement. In this photograph of a peasant reading El Machetethe newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, Modotti brings her careful attention surrounding composition, cropping, light and dark, and texture, to a subject with great social and political significance.

Modotti had joined the Communist Party of Mexico this same year after learning that Italy had fallen to fascism. She brought her revolutionary zeal to her photographs of the late s, many of which she published in Communist newspaper El Machetea newspaper for workers and peasants. Whilst many photographers of this period, including Edward Weston and Paul Strand, were focused on a romanticized view of a timeless Mexico, Modotti turned to her camera to its people and to the real effects of its ongoing changes.

She often collaborated with workers to produce photographs that were intended to raise class-consciousness and depict their daily lives. At a moment when new governmental education reforms sought to educate the lower and working classes in Mexico, a seemingly straightforward image of a man reading a newspaper also had subversive undertones, particularly to the middle class.

As Sarah Lowe notes: "The young obrero reading El Machete is a reminder that the Revolution's promise of universal literacy would only be fulfilled by the activism of the people. In this iconic black and white photograph, a woman dominates the picture frame. Standing with arm raised holding a large gourd on her head, she gazes off to the right, somewhere out of the picture frame.

She wears a circular pendant and earrings, and a traditional Tehuana dress with geometric patterns, the costume that has been so well made visible by the work of Modotti's friend, Frida Kahlo. The careful framing, cropping, and pose emphasize the image's angular forms. Shot from below to emphasize the woman's noble and heroic stature, the photograph was taken during a trip to Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico.

Unlike Modotti's earlier photographs, the photographs taken in Tehuantepec were largely unposed, typically street photographs that captured the daily lives of the women that lived there. Like other artists and writers in Mexico, Modotti was influenced by Mexicanidad, which embraced native cultures and indigenous subjects as part of the larger renewal in Mexican art and culture in the s.

This interest is evident in Woman from Tehuantepec. One of Modotti's most iconic images, it became a potent symbol of Mexicanidad and an exercise in photographic tina modotti photographer biography template. As Sarah Lowe has noted, "the image function[s] like still life, precisely because Modotti chose not just any woman, but a well-known Mexican type - the Tehuana - to photograph.

As pictured by Modotti, these women of Tehuantepec were an ideal subject, and provided her with an already-given meaning since Tehuantepec is a matriarchal society, there women have a significant voice in the running of the local economy and politics. Modotti uses the Tehuana to make a powerful political point: that women were capable of independent political action.

A closely cropped black and white photograph of two hands holding a puppet's strings, Hand of the Puppeteer makes dramatic use of light and shadow, textural contrasts, and isolation of the subject, to produce a carefully composed image that resonates with symbolism. As in her other photographs from this period, Modotti combined the formal rigor typical of modernist photography with her interest in using photography for the betterment of society.

Tina modotti photographer biography template

Hand of the Puppeteer is part of a series of photographs Modotti made in on artists at work. In this instance, she photographed the puppet theater of Lou Bunin, an American artist who was invited to Mexico by Diego Rivera to work as his apprentice. A friendship developed between Modotti and Bunin, who shared interests in the theater and the belief that art should reflect contemporary reality.

According to Sarah Lowe, "Bunin. Bunin's use of puppets was also a political metaphor. In this context, according to Lowe, "The puppet controlled from above is a metaphoric description of the asymmetrical power relations between those governing and those governed, a perceptive comment upon the social and political conditions in Mexico in the s, and perhaps on Mexico's relationship with the United States at the time.

Similar to the Telephone Wiresstrings that are usually attached are being dethatched and set free. Furthermore, the subject of hands is one that recurs regularly and interestingly, often within the movement of Surrealism. Hands were included in Man Ray's early "Rayographs", as well as in notable works by Dora Maar and Claude Cahun, and as such the view and treatment of this subject widens the reach of Modotti's career beyond Straight Photography.

Tina Modotti was born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, and given the nickname Assuntina, a diminutive of her mother's name, later shortened to Tina. She was the third of six children born to Giuseppe Modotti and Assunta Mondini, and the family lived in the Northeastern Italian town of Udine, at the base of the Austrian Alps. Although the historic town of Udine was prosperous and in general politically conservative, the working classes tended toward Socialism and political activism.

Modotti's father was among those influenced by such activism; he often attended demonstrations and meetings, including the May Day demonstrations that took place every year. The family moved, and Modotti spent much of her childhood living in Austria, where her father worked as a mason, and her mother stayed home with the children working as a seamstress to generate additional income.

Inthe family returned to Udine and Modotti left school to work in a textile factory. Although she seems to have had little exposure to art as a child, her uncle Pietro Modotti did run a successful photography studio and schoolwhere she may have worked as a teenager. In he moved to San Francisco, where he opened a photography studio in North Beach, the Italian hub of the city.

After her arrival in San Francisco, Modotti worked odd jobs in the city's garment industry. In the mids she met Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey known as Robo to his friendsan American bohemian painter and poet, who had a profound influence on Modotti's early artistic life. Through Richey, Modotti was introduced to the artists, writers, photographers, and other members of the cultural elite, including the prominent photography critic Sadakichi Hartman.

Alejandro G. Nieto, Christina Carlos and Veronica Mercado. Richard Norton Gallery. Retrieved March 23, Jacobin Magazine. Retrieved February 28, City University of New York. Wiener Zeitung. Retrieved July 6, The Guardian. Tina Modotti, Photographer and Revolutionary. London: Pandora, Yale University Press. Retrieved October 6, Genova Palazzo Ducale — Fondazione per la cultura in Italian.

Retrieved August 2, The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved September 23, Retrieved September 20, August 16, Retrieved December 29, Further tina modotti photographer biography template [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tina Modotti. Edward Weston. Diego Rivera. List of works. Detroit Industry Murals — Man at the Crossroads The Rivals Zapata Glorious Victory Authority control databases.

Gallery [ change change source ]. References [ change change source ]. Paul Getty Museum. Archived at the Wayback Machine Retrieved September 12, Authority control.