Tina Modotti is usually remembered as the mistress of American photographer Edward Weston. She was, of course many other things. Arriving in the US as a penniless Italian migrant she first worked as a seamstress. She soon became a clothes designer, opera singer, silent movie star and eventually, as a pupil of Weston, a photographer. Moving from San Francisco to Mexico she played a major part in that country's cultural revival, becoming a close friend and colleague of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Manuel Bravo. She also became embroiled in politics, joined the Communist Party and took part in the Spanish Civil War as a non-combatant. Back in Mexico she was possibly implicated in the assassination of Trotsky and died in 1941 under mysterious circumstances.

A beautiful and brilliant woman whose short life reads like a novel.

On Photography

by Tina Modotti

(Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5 No.4, October-December 1929)

Always, when the words "art" and "artistic" are applied to my photographic work, I am disagreeably affected. This is due, surely, to the bad use and abuse made of these terms.

I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations. The majority of photographers still seek "artistic" effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have, - photographic quality.

Whether or not photography may or may not be a work of art comparable to other plastic creation has been much discussed in recent years. Naturally, opinions differ. There are those who do accept photography as a medium of expression on a par with any other and there are others who continue to look myopically at the twentieth century with eighteenth century eyes, incapable of accepting the manifestations of our mechanical civilisation. But, for us who use the camera as a tool just as the painter does his brushes, adverse opinions do not matter. We have the approbation of those who recognise the merits of photography in its multiple aspects and accept it as the most eloquent, the most direct means for fixing, for registering the present epoch.

To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.

Such work gives the impression that the photographer is almost ashamed of making photographs and tries to hide what there is of photography in his work, superimposing effects and falsifications that can only please those of perverted taste.

Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.