MODOTTI, TINA

Tehuana in marketplace, Tehuantepec, Mexico. Silver print, 5x3 inches (12.7x7.6 cm.), mounted. 1929 a unique print and one of the last photographs taken by modotti who, by the late 1920s, had rethought her outlook on life and direction her work would take. Margaret Hooks, Modotti's biographer, notes: "After the success of her photographic abstractions Modotti abandoned the formal idiom for a vernacular style, which she characterized as the "perfect snapshot," in which "the moving quality of life rather than still studies" constituted the ideal photograph. This Tehuantepec study was the first series of photographs to embody her new approach to photography. According to Hooks, the photograph was made in early 1929 following the ordeal of the assassination of her lover, Julio Antonio Melia, and a trial in which she was accused, and ultimately, acquitted, of his murder. Emotionally and physically enervated, Modotti sought refuge in the towns of Juchitan and Tehuantepec, located in the balmy lowlands of Oaxaca, where there still remains elements of a matriarchal enclave. The tall proud Zapotec Indian women of the area, known as Tehuanas, enchanted Modotti. (Mexican artists, such as the painter Frida Kahlo, for example, adopted their dress as her trademark, bringing it international fame.) Modotti considered several of these photographs to be of exhibition quality and sent them to Weston for inclusion in a show he was organizing in 1929. In a letter she told him, "... all the exposures had to be done in such a hurry [for] as soon as they saw me with the camera the women would automatically increase their speed of walking; and they walk swiftly by nature...".