by Matteo Pericoli

Tina Modotti (Wikimedia Commons)

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I have found huge inspiration lately in the work of Tina Modotti, the Italian photographer who, in the early 1900s, immigrated to San Francisco to escape a life of poverty. After several years in California, she moved to Mexico — a place that would greatly influence her and where she would experience the most intense and productive years of her life. It was there that she was introduced to Mexico’s leftist movements and to artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (she was a model for a few Rivera murals) and where she worked tirelessly to document the lives of many rural Mexican communities. She was an activist, a feminist and an advocate of human rights. She died much too young at the age of forty-seven.

I have gone three times to see a retrospective¹ of her life and work in order to absorb her vision and her energy, both of which have helped reinforce how I feel about my own work, i.e. that the apparent simplicity of a window view drawing, similar to Modotti’s view of the world through her “honest photographs”, can be a powerful means to convey stories, views, visions and personal reflections. It’s not about art per se. In fact, Tina Modotti was very much against the concepts of “art” and “artist”, because of “the bad use and abuse made of these terms²”, which is something I, too, have always felt.

Tina Modotti considered herself “a photographer, nothing more” and she tried to produce “not art but honest photographs”, which is exactly how I see my drawings. They are simply the product of many intricate lines, “without distortions or manipulations³”, which are the very words Tina Modotti used to describe her photographs.

The only substantial (and unavoidable) difference is the concept of “present”. Her photographs, and photography in general, “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 for registering objective life⁴” (Tina Modotti).

Yet, when I am in front of the dozens of photos of the window view that I have to draw, I have to extend that instant, that fleeting present moment, and stretch it to last minutes, hours, sometimes days before I can even begin to draw it. I see this present-moment-stretched-to-almost-infinity as that same kind of view of “objective life” that Tina Modotti talked about. The result of which, in my case, is a seemingly simple drawing, a drawing whose stillness in time serves as a platform for a story (that of the viewer, the window view “owner”). Because the present moment is, after all, everything there is.

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1. At Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo, first, and then at Camera in Turin. ↩︎
2. Modotti, Tina. “Sobre la fotografía = On Photography.” Mexican Folkways (Mexico City) 5, no.4 (October-December 1929): 196-198 ↩︎
3. Ibid ↩︎
4. Ibid ↩︎