TIna Modotti - Workers\' Parade

Leonardo De Vivo AHI 189 Spring ’14 12/5/14

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Tina Modotti. Revolutionary photography.

A crowd of men wearing straw hats is immortalized while marching through a street. They are hundreds but the impression is that hundreds more are marching along with them outside the frame. Those inside pack the entire photographic plane, leaving only a few empty spots. We only see their backs which makes them anonymous as individuals but powerful as a mass. They move on a diagonal line, up to the right; it is a positive direction. Like blood that runs in the veins, warm, silently, they flow through the street. They are the essential cells that sustain the larger organism. They are campesinos; their distinct large straw hats, “symbol of rural life and agrarian reform”1 , are the only defense against the long days under the strong sun. The hats form waves, underneath some men are talking to each other, others are looking right, or left, most of them are looking forward, for better conditions. The shadows’ direction on the street seems to indicates that is midday. Maybe at this hour they should be at work but today they are manifesting. The photo is taken from a high viewpoint probably from a balcony or a terrace but the ability and sensitivity of the photographer to capture the essence of the moment, bridges the distance and we are moving in solidarity with the campesinos. This photo is known as the Workers’ Parade and was taken in Mexico by Tina Modotti. Workers’ Parade exemplifies Modotti’s ability to illustrate social issues within

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Hooks, Margaret. Tina Modotti, photographer and revolutionary. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. pp.121

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an artistic context. The photo was taken in 1926. The Mexican revolution just ended few years before but things were not completely settled. There was unrest among farmers that were allured by the revolution and its promises of land only to be awakened to a different reality. Overseas in Italy, Mussolini and the fascist regime came to power, similar signs were emerging in Germany and Greece followed with its own dictatorship. Societies were being transformed by the spreading of mechanization. Countries, like Mexico, were shifting from an agricultural culture to an industrial capitalism and along with the changes came workers’ exploitation. In USA a climate of mistrust in immigrants, socialism, unions, lead to the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti “guilty only of a deep sincerity in their anarchistic political philosophy.” 2 Few years later the Great Depression would shake the entire world to its core. At the same time, Mexico was also undergoing an artistic renaissance. A rediscovery of its indian roots brought to art a new vitality. Artists like Diego Rivera were paid by the hour, like factory workers, to create murals all over Mexico. In this socio-political context, Tina Modotti was circulating among artists and political activists groups whose influence eventually lead her to move to Mexico and be a committed element in the communist party. Tina, originally from Italy, emigrated to the USA when she was 17. She became an actress of silent movies, then transformed herself in a photographer and later in a radical activist. In Italy when a child, her father

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Mildred, Constantine. Tina Modotti: a fragile life, an illustrated biography. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. pp.108-109

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used to bring her on his shoulder to socialist rallies and workers’ strikes, something that would remain engrained in Tina for all her life and would be an essential element in her art. Workers’ Parade, as most of Tina’s photos, contains an obsession with humanity.3 The image stands at the intersection between art and politics. It reflects the exact position of the photographer that will later decide to abandon art and take the political route. According to Margaret Hooks this photo is to be considered the very first ideological attempt of Modotti to combine art and politics.4 The photo is an example of Modotti’s artistry being at the service of a cause and “that is why we do not feel that her photography was an act of aggression against her subjects.”5 Stylistically, the image is characterized by a lack of a main focal point. In true socialist spirit, every man here is equally depicted and the photo in its entirety, as the community that illustrates, becomes the true focus. Compositionally, it extrapolates a fragment from the whole, creating an almost abstract dance of white circles bathed by the sun. Although politically charged, the photo shows Modotti's attention to the artistic values. Tina Modotti was living in Mexico with Edward Weston, who had become her mentor and her lover. Weston was breaking from what he felt the formal boundaries of

3

Argenteri, Letizia. Tina Modotti: between art and revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. pp. 130. 4

Hooks, Margaret. Tina Modotti, photographer and revolutionary. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. pp.121 5

Argenteri, Letizia. Tina Modotti: between art and revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. pp. 130.

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Pictorialism into Modernism. He did not believe in the rules of composition, he stated that “when subject matter is fit into preconceived patterns there can be no freshness of vision,”6 for him a good composition was a matter of personal growth. Under his wing, Tina was growing, she started to see with a new open eye.7 For her, photography was a transformative experience, she describes it with these poetic words, “…when you start to look closely at the world everything around you seems alive and dense with meaning…observe there are intricate dreams and philosophies in the spikes of a cactus, delirious passions in the petals of a lonely flower.”8 In this regard, it can be counter-argued that photography is a comfortable surrogate of reality. In her seminal essay on photography, Susan Sontang wrote, “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.”9 Uncompromising words that point to a dream-like state in which the world likes to anesthetize itself. At the same time there is a possibility of escaping from the cave. In fact, the shadows in Plato’s cave do not posses the power to keep anyone chained. The possibility emerges from the prisoner once he realizes his true nature. The attentive photographer, with an open eye and an inquiring spirit, will firmly plant himself into the present moment whatever it offers and will break through the mirror. Photography can be a transformative act as long as 6

Trachtenberg, Alan. Classic essays on photography. New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Island Books, 1980. pp 175. 7

Mildred, Constantine. Tina Modotti: a fragile life, an illustrated biography. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. 8

Longfellow, Brenda. Tina in Mexico. DVD/Streaming. 2002. http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/detail.cfm?filmId=2409

9

Sontag, Susan. On photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. pp. 1.

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one is an aware participant, a cognitive observer of what is around. This transformation occurred in Tina Modotti. Her vocational determination to represent social struggles coupled with an acute artistic sensitivity is what empowers the men in “Workers’ Parade.” Her ability to see, renders eternal the voices of those individuals that otherwise would go uncredited by history.

Tina Modotti (1896–1942) Workers Parade (1926) Gelatin silver print. Dimensions: 8 7/16 x 7 5/16" (21.5 x 18.6 cm)