Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti

by Patricia Albers

Born in 1896, Tina Modotti lived one of the most brilliant lives of her era. A first-generation modernist photographer, she created internationally renowned images of extra-ordinary formal clarity and profound soulfulness. But Modotti's artistic achievement is only one facet of her astonishing story. A legendary beauty, spirited and sensuous, she scripted for herself a series of remarkable roles--glamorous actress; jazz age bohemian; Communist agent; and lover, colleague, and muse to photographer Edward Weston and painter Diego Rivera. Her friends included the illustrious--Frida Kahlo, Pablo Neruda, John Dos Passos, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Dorothea Lange, Sergei Eisenstein, and La Pasionaria--as well as workers, peasants, and humble people everywhere.

Filled with the rich details of Modotti's turbulent interior life and of her journey through the cultural and political upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, Shadows, Fire, The Life of Tina Modotti is a provocative adventure. We follow the impoverished Italian immigrant to the San Francisco stage and to the glitter of early Hollywood, then on to the artistic circles of post-revolutionary Mexico. Dramatically expelled from her adopted country, Modotti made her way to Stalin's Moscow and to the Spanish Civil War, from which she emerged tormented by tragic memories. Returning to Mexico City, she died alone in a taxicab, probably of heart disease, though rumors persist that she was liquidated by her comrades.

Shadows, Fire, The Life of Tina Modotti is the first fully realized biography of this luminous figure. Drawing upon ten years of research and some 300 letters and photographs discovered in long-forgotten trunks in a family attic, author Patricia Albers brings new recognition to a talented, intelligent, and independent woman, whose bold quest is a prototype for contemporary seekers.

Ever a flamboyant personality, she was nonetheless pursued, even after death, by a glaring spotlight of publicity and controversy. Her burial, in a fifth-class tomb, drew many of the grand old warriors of international communism. Meanwhile, Mexico City's modern art gallery readied a retrospective of her photographs, and journalists dredged up yellowing scandal sheets shrieking of romance, violence, deceit, and Tina Modotti. . . . "The dramatic circumstances surrounding [her death] measured up to those of her agitated, subterranean, and adventurous life," typed one eager reporter. "Bees, shadows, fire, snow," intoned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his elegy, "silence and foam combining with steel and wire and pollen . . ."

Genres: Art, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Photography, Womens, Art History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published April 27, 1999

About the author

Patricia Albers's new biography Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész brings readers up close to the eventful life and ground breaking art of the photographer André Kertész. Born in Budapest in 1894, Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through fifteen years shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions.

Patricia takes Kertész from the eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively central European diaspora. From Condé Nast's postwar media empire to the photo boom of the 1970s, she revisits Kertész's relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassaï and his protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulgence in deception.

Patricia's earlier books include Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life and Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tina Modotti had the kind of life only the 20th century could offer--specifically, the era between the two World Wars, buoyed by the sense of possibility after the First before sinking into the vicious ideologies that caused the Second. For someone who died relatively young, Modotti had a strikingly peripatetic history--born in the squalid poverty of rural Italy, emigrating to San Francisco in time to become a minor screen actress and a photographer of note, on to post-revolutionary Mexico, Marxist Russia, Berlin and Vienna as they succumbed to fascism, Paris, where she was something of a spy, Spain during the Civil War, and then back to Mexico. She was a valued friend to a variety of great writers and artists. She was a friend to the Mexican muralists, tried to save the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda marked her passing with a poem. She learned photography from Edward Weston and used it to document Diego Rivera's monumental murals, but her own work in that medium has a spare and meticulous power of its own, even when most political--she was a lifelong Marxist. She would have achieved much more in photography, but was deported from Mexico, winding up in a Soviet Russia with cumbersome equipment just as camera became more portable and finding herself without any photographic paper that hers could use; still, Sergei Eisenstein praised what he saw of her work. In any case, she abandoned the camera for political work, much of it undercover in France and Spain, where she passed herself off as a nun in a hospital for workers. One of her lovers was assassinated in Mexico, and a second was a Stalinist thug, famous for executions in Spain and a participant in the attack on Trotsky. The prose style of the biography sometimes breathless (though moving when describing the desperate flight of the losing Spanish Republicans from Barcelona) but well-researched (if not impeccably--the Mexican group Los Contemporaneos were poets, not artists). This biography shows that Modotti did not always live well, and certainly not without regret, but with passion and conviction wherever she found herself.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This photographer should be more famous. The photos in the book are outstanding and equal to or better than Evans, Weston, Lange, etc., all of whom achieved fame for being pioneers in this field. While her career was short, the photos in this book show breakthroughs in style and content.

Where did her life get broken? Weston seems to use her as an assistant even as her work (in my opinion) eclipses his. Was it the struggle for recognition in her art? Was she seen more of an actress or bohemian hostess than a serious artist? Was it the trauma of having two lovers dying essentially in her arms? Was it an inability to forget her childhood poverty? Was it a quest for paternal approval? (Giuseppe Modotti spawned a host of radical children.) After the horror of being accused of Julio's murder was Vittorio her only alternative?

This is an incredibly provocative story. The story of Jack Reed has probably been glamorized beyond all recognition. Is this the sorry female equivalent?

I'd have liked more analysis and less flourish in the writing style. Given the scale of original research, analysis might have to be something for the next scholar. As to the writing style here are two examples: p. 154: "Ben and Bumpo were working stiffs with a handsome sulk about them" and p. 240 "Although the sun flirted with Berlin, cold stung their cheeks as the threesome strolled the banks of the Spree River."

There is a lot here for anyone interested in photographers, the bohemian lifestyle Mexico City in the early 20th century or the fate of idealists who joined the communist cause. I recommend it for readers with these interests.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. The author warns that Tina Modotti was not an extravagant person, which makes the narrative sometimes a bit lackluster. But the settings and events and photography more than make up for that.

[Teri · Rating 3 out of 5]

My life is incredibly dull..that is my takeaway from this book. I think Westin was smart to get out of this incredible trauma/drama life of political chaos. Is it ever worth it?

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating figure

[Ian Farragher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward Weston is my hero. SO...
When I found this in a random bookstore. I purchased it for the small amount of Tina Modotti's photography it contains. When eventually I did read this book, I surprised by the narrative quality of the author and even more so by the life of an artist who had so much of a hidden influence on 20th century art.

Being a student/lover of Weston, was only a tiny portion of her fascinating life. A good read. And at the end, I found that Tina is also my hero.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

First I fell in love with Tina Modotti's black and white photography. Her pictures captured the essence of humanity - she finds beauty in everything she sees through her camera lens. When I started reading about her life, I was really hooked. She lived a passionate life of commitment and bravery - she couldn't have loved more fiercely. If you are interested in biographies, give this book a chance!

[Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best and most definitve book on Communist photographer Tina Modotti.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing woman, sad life. Easy to read, descriptive language.