Tina Modotti: An extreme biography between life and art

Abstract

The article analyses the photographic work of Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer of the early twentieth century and a passionate political activist. Modotti approached photography after meeting Edward Weston, an established American photographer who, in addition to being her teacher, would also become her romantic partner. Their trip to Mexico City in 1922 inaugurated what would be the most important decade for her (1922-1932) both from a personal and artistic point of view. Tina Modotti, starting from the premises of her teacher's photographic technique, would soon distance herself from it to find her own an esthetics based on a poetics that is built on a conception of art that does not neglect the need for an identification between the artist and his work. It is the presence of a new, close-up gaze that fills her photographs with beauty and pathos. Modotti is completely in his work: his photographs, whether the social ones of indigenous women, Mexican workers and farmers, or the images of flowers, plants or skies, express an autobiographical narrative that, imbued with eros, gives us back the spirit of the artist sensitive to the immeasurable beauty of the cosmos and its mystery: to the divine element.