Selfies. Everywhere you go — scenic spot, restaurant, political event — there they are, people taking selfies. Some people have even fallen backwards off cliffs, trying to get just the right shot. Look at me! Oops.
“Self” isn’t found in the images of Mexican photographer Tina Modotti. In the 1920s and 1930s, as photojournalist David Bacon explains, she was a groundbreaking revolutionary photographer — revolutionary in her style and technique and also in her subject matter. She photographed not national leaders, not the rich and famous — the mainstay of popular photographic fare — but workers, farmers, indigenous people and women. She reveals their dignity and resolve, how they struggle against oppressive conditions as they go about their daily lives. Modotti’s photos don’t focus on individuals; she brings to light not the unique, but the universal.
It’s a revolutionary task to document the harsh living conditions of working people, how they strive to gain their rightful place as the backbone of any society. A single image in a single instant can sometimes move us to laughter, tears or outrage and then propel us out into the street. Modotti’s photography did all that.
But when the moment called for more, for a different kind of fight, Modotti left off taking photos and took up organizing resistance to fascism. Her legacy is more than a cache of groundbreaking images — it’s a lesson in being a revolutionary.
David Bacon can be counted as a revolutionary photographer of today. His camera’s eye and his own eyes look outward, not backward at “self.” His life and his photography follow in Modotti’s tradition, focused on the lives of oppressed people and revolutionary struggle. Thank goodness there are still people like David who know who and what demands our attention.
Acclaimed photojournalist David Bacon spent 20 years working as a labor organizer for unions where immigrant workers made up much of the membership. His personal experiences with workers around the world, Mexican workers in particular, give Bacon a window into the daily lives of immigrant workers — and a unique insight into the impact of US policy and the global economy on the struggle for global worker justice. Among his books is The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration.**
Armco, Middletown, Ohio, 1922 Photo: Edward Weston
How did Tina Modotti first develop her ideas on photography?
In 1913, at age 16, Modotti’s working-class parents brought her to San Francisco from Udine, in northern Italy. When she moved to Hollywood, she met Edward Weston, a founder of modernism in photography who was discarding the soft-focused pictorialism favored by established photographers. His 1922 images of the Armco steel mill, in their simplicity and sharp focus, were historic in the development of modernism.
Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, sailing to Mexico, 1923. Photo: Chandler Weston
From Weston, Modotti acquired technical skills and learned his approach.
At 27, she was searching for her way in the world as a photographer and as a woman, and the two went to Mexico together. There, Modotti and Weston became more collaborators than student and teacher.
What was her own approach to photography?
Modotti employed the modernist aesthetic to give her politics greater impact — she had formally joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. The modernist style of directness, sharp focus and simplicity infused her work with tremendous power, and her photographs were soon well-known in the US as well as Mexico.
Her famous image of a hammer and sickle was a cover for The New Masses at the height of the magazine’s popularity.
Sombrero, Hammer and Sickle, 1927 Photo: Tina Modotti.
The image was part of a series in which she started with a straight depiction of the Bolshevik hammer and sickle symbol from the Russian Revolution and then gradually removed those images. First, she added a sombrero and then replaced the Russian images with a bandolier, a guitar and an ear of corn. She was “Mexicanizing” communism with symbols that would make sense and provide political inspiration based on Mexico’s own revolutionary history.
Her image of a workers’ march, her camera catching the massed sombreros of the workers without showing their faces, conveyed a sense of the political power and militance of workers as a class. In another photo, a group of workers are reading a copy of El Machete, the Communist Party newspaper. It illustrated that the paper and its Party speak to the working class and that ordinary people were becoming literate as they participated in politics.
Men reading “El Machete,” c. 1927 Photo: Tina Modotti
Was Modotti a feminist?
Modotti shot luminous portraits of Indigenous women, including a well-known image of a woman holding a baby, in which the light gives their skin and muscles almost three dimensions.
Her genius as an artist, her independent life, and her unwillingness to subordinate herself to men, including Weston, have established her as a major figure in feminist and women’s studies. For instance, she posed nude in several Weston photographs, and these photographs are charged with the photographer’s sexual desire. But looking at them from Modotti’s perspective, as the person in the image, they appear matter-of-fact. She doesn’t face the camera and displays no come-on. The attitude is simply, “This is my body, part of who I am.”
But she soon stopped this kind of posing, and we’re left to wonder if she had growing reservations about whether this photography could be a disservice to women.
Tina Modotti. Photo: Edward Weston
Two women from Tehuantepec with jicalpextle bowl Photo: Tina Modotti
The thirties were tumultuous years with fascism on the rise. What did Modotti do during that time?
As a dedicated Communist Party member, Modotti spent the second half of her life fighting for revolution. In 1930, because of her political affiliations, Mexico’s incoming right-wing government deported her, along with Vittorio Vidali, the Comintern’s representative in Mexico. The two became partners, comrades and lovers, a relationship that lasted to the end of her life. They went to Berlin, then to Moscow, and then back to Berlin after Hitler took power in 1934, constantly working to support imprisoned or framed revolutionaries.
When the anti-fascist Civil War broke out in Spain in 1936, she went and stayed throughout. She worked as head of Socorro Rojo, or Red Aid, organizing support first for the soldiers and civilian population and then for refugees fleeing Franco. She traveled from city to city, even by boat from Barcelona to Valencia, under the guns of the fascist-occupied coast. As Franco’s armies advanced and the International Brigades left the country in 1939, “I felt anguish in my heart, and I thought about how this was the end,” she recalled. In the following weeks, she helped half a million people make their escape from Barcelona to the French frontier, under bombs and strafing planes. But the fascists tortured and killed many of her comrades.
With no possessions, Modotti left Spain for France, where the Mexican ambassador got her a visa to the US. However, when the Queen Mary docked in New York, immigration authorities refused to let her off the boat. Her sister, Yolanda Magrini, a Communist artist, tried in vain to get on board to see her. Modotti, absent from the US since 1923, was never able to return. She went to Mexico, which gave asylum to many who fled fascist Spain.
What’s her legacy as a photographer?
A.I.Z. (Worker’s Illustrated Magazine) 1929–1934, John Heartfield 1891–1968
Her photographs from Mexico were widely published by Willi Munzenberg’s AIZ, or the Workers Pictorial Newspaper.
In 1932, in her article, Photos as a Weapon for Red Aid Agitation, she argued that photography makes possible the “objective” reproduction of the harsh reality of capitalism, but that images should not merely illustrate text but should speak for themselves.
Modotti herself, however, didn’t return to photography but worked full-time for revolution, giving as her reason her hatred for “the intolerable exploitation of the workers of the countries of South America and the Caribbean” and the “bloody revenge on peasants who fight for their land, the torture of imprisoned revolutionaries, [and] armed attacks on street rallies and unemployed marches.”
Contrary to the bourgeois idea that artists must sacrifice everything for their art, she held the revolutionary view that fighting against fascism and for communism was more important than her photography.
Tragically, she died in 1942 at only 45 years old, in the middle of the war against Nazism, without seeing the final anti-fascist victory.
You are a political activist and photographer as well. Did Modotti influence your own path?
In my work, I’ve come to terms with who I am as a participant in the world and in social movements and see my photography as part of that.
I want photographs to have a social function and usefulness, to reflect reality, and to have an aesthetic quality that people can appreciate, even when the immediate circumstances become part of history.
You can look at a photograph Tina Modotti took in Mexico City in 1927, and it’s still a beautiful photograph, although the world she photographed has certainly changed. Her purpose in taking photographs, as a social activist, is still clear, and it’s a purpose I share.
I try to participate in the world to make it a better one, for social justice and to help movements fighting for change.
Meizhu Lui’s experiences as the daughter of Chinese immigrants and as a single mom led her to focus on addressing inequalities based on race, gender, and immigration status. A hospital kitchen worker, she was elected president of her AFSCME local. She coordinated the national Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, and co-authored The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. Liberation Road, a socialist organization, has been her political home.
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