The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO, in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture in St. Petersburg, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, and Reinhard Schultz's Galerie Bilderwelt, has opened a major exhibition dedicated to Tina Modotti (1896-1942). The exhibition celebrates one of the 20th century's most fascinating yet lesser-known photographers, who was also an actress, model, activist, and revolutionary. This marks the second time Modotti's work has been displayed in Russia, following the first exhibition in Moscow in 1999.
The comprehensive exhibition features 70 works by Modotti alongside several pieces by her mentor and lover Edward Weston, all from the Reinhard Schultz collection. Visitors can view her iconic photographs spanning different periods of her career, from famous images documenting the Mexican revolutionary movement and the acclaimed Women of Tehuantepec series to lesser-known portraits, botanical photographs, murals, and pictures of Lou Bunin's puppets. A significant portion of the exhibition includes previously unseen photographs and documents from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, revealing details about Modotti's activities in Moscow and her connections with prominent Soviet cultural and political figures including Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Elena Stasova.
Modotti's life story reads like a novel of art, passion, and political upheaval. Born in Udine, Italy, she spent her childhood years in Italy and Austria before following her father to America at age 16. In the United States, she worked in a factory, married, and appeared in several films. However, her true photographic career began when she moved to Mexico, where she claimed to have discovered her authentic self and found the perfect balance between her political and aesthetic ideals.
Mexico became the defining chapter of Modotti's artistic journey, and she is primarily remembered as a Mexican photographer. Her career there came to an abrupt end when she was deported on the pretext of a fabricated assassination attempt against Mexican President Ortiz Rubio. Remarkably, she abandoned photography entirely after leaving Mexico, as if the country had been essential to her artistic expression.
Following her exile from Mexico, Modotti embarked on an active political life that took her across continents. She engaged in political activities in Moscow, undertook secret party missions throughout Europe, conducted political work in Paris, and provided risky assistance to Republicans during the Spanish Civil War as a nurse, journalist, and Soviet representative. Her journey concluded with a tragic return to Mexico, where she died in 1942. Many details of her life remain classified to this day.
For decades, Modotti was often viewed through the lens of her relationships with famous men, portrayed in passive roles as a muse, model, femme fatale, assistant, and associate. Her notable partners included American poet and artist Robo de Richey, renowned American modernist photographer Edward Weston, Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Javier Guerrero, Cuban Communist Party founder Julio Antonio Mella, and Spanish Civil War commander Vittorio Vidali. However, thanks to feminist studies and the dedicated efforts of curators organizing major Modotti exhibitions worldwide since the 1980s, her work has gained recognition as an independent and significant contribution to photography and art history.
In the turbulent post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s, Modotti stood as the only woman in a predominantly patriarchal world of artists and revolutionaries. Despite the challenges, she earned recognition and respect from her peers and became an inspiring example for young female artists, including Frida Kahlo and Lola Alvarez Bravo, who were among her closest associates.
During her brief seven-year photographic career, Modotti achieved remarkable artistic heights by combining technical excellence with socially relevant content and modernist aesthetics. She mastered innovative photographic techniques and developed a new vision that explored tonal contrasts, extraordinary angles, modern geometry, and double exposure. Her photographs captured the spirit of rapid change characteristic of the early 20th century, reflecting industrialization and the dynamic energy of the era.
While her mentor Edward Weston focused primarily on the beauty of form in photography, Modotti directed her lens toward ordinary people, revealing the beauty and power of their labor and transforming the mundane into the symbolic, the material into the intangible. She was among the first photographers to document members of the unique matriarchal society in Tehuantepec, Mexico, an enclave that later inspired Frida Kahlo's choice of traditional dresses. Her powerful photographs of Mexican peasants and what she called "Aztec madonnas" gained international recognition and graced the covers of numerous magazines worldwide.
The exhibition "Tina Modotti – Art, Love, Revolution" ran from September 20 to November 17, 2019, at the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO, located at 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg, Russia. This exhibition provided Russian audiences with a rare opportunity to explore the work and legacy of a photographer whose forgotten contributions have been rediscovered by researchers, collectors, and writers since the late 20th century, drawn to the intensity of a life where art, love, and revolution converged in extraordinary ways.
