Tina Modotti at the Cerralbo Museum. One of the great photographers of the 20th century

The Cerralbo Museum, the state museum of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and PHotoESPAÑA present Tina Modotti, an exhibition dedicated to one of the great women of 20th-century photography. The exhibition brings together a total of 108 images and some crucial archive objects in the artist's life, with which it proposes a journey through the author's biography and work.

Despite her short career as a photographer, Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896-Mexico, 1946) was able to create an aesthetic of great force. She became one of the main reporters of one of the most convulsive periods in the history of Mexico, the country in which she lived and died.

The exhibition, which can be visited from July 15 to October 2, continues the line of research work in photography at the Cerralbo Museum in Madrid, which exhibits everything from historical collections to contemporary creations. In this way, the collaboration has continued for more than a decade with PHotoESPAÑA.

It is not the only one of the museums attached to the Ministry of Culture and Sports that participate in the photographic event. In its official section, there is also the Museum of Romanticism, with the exhibition Germain Krull. Chronicle of an exile; and the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, with Javier Campano. The Roving Eye: 1975–1987.


Tina Modotti, Woman with Jicara on her head, 1929, Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico © Tina Modotti. Courtesy: Galerie Bilderwelt, Reinhard Schultz.

About the author
Tina Modotti was an immigrant in the United States, a Hollywood actress, photographer, revolutionary, communist militant, political refugee, and member of the International Red Aid. She assumed, from a very young age, a woman's role in opposition to the social imaginary imposed at the time. And in the short time that her rich existence lasted, she sought beauty through photography and worked for social justice through political militancy.

He left Udine at the age of 16, following his father and sister to San Francisco, where he met photographer Edward Weston, who was already a renowned artist. He began as his model and, shortly after, this bond led to a sentimental relationship that had great relevance on the artistic level since it gave rise to one of the most interesting collaborations in XNUMXth-century photography. But her encounter with Mexico was the event that marked her life, because with this country Modotti made a mirror, identifying himself socially, politically and culturally.

He developed all his photographic work between 1923 and 1930, years in which he lived in Mexico. Despite this short period of time, the quality of his work is comparable to that which many reach after a lifetime. His aesthetic had a decisive impact on the panorama of Mexican photography, in the same way that the painting of Diego Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros influenced his own. Modotti produced his work in the political and artistic context of the first half of the XNUMXth century, a fact that conditioned his production and his way of perceiving the world since he immersed himself in the nationalist avant-garde, a current that was not satisfied with the nineteenth-century representation.

His photographic production is a paradigm of the fusion between Mexican revolutionary culture and avant-garde photographic aesthetics. To this, she added the ideals of equality proposed by socialism and her feeling and capacity as a socially committed subject, which brought "meaning" to his life.