“[…] But I don’t want to talk about me. I wish to talk only about photography and what we can achieve with the lens. I wish to photograph what I see, sincerely, directly, without tricks, and I think that can be my contribution to a better world.” Tina Modotti, 1926

From 26 September 2024 to 16 February 2025, the halls of Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna will host a major exhibition dedicated to Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942), a prominent figure in photography and political activism in the first half of the twentieth century. Organized and produced by Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni, and Rubens Fogacci of Pallavicini s.r.l., together with the Tina Modotti Committee, the exhibition, curated by Francesca Bogliolo, aims to retrace, through a refined selection of about one hundred works and some precious documents, the human story of a courageous and nonconformist woman who was able to interpret the sentiments of her time, developing a poetics of truth imbued with human values that transcend the boundaries of space and time. Independent, free, and modern, Tina Modotti combined her love for art and truth with her political fervor, which guided her choices and actions as an activist, with the aim of contributing to the creation of a better world. In continuous dialogue with artists and intellectuals during the evolution of her expressive periods, Modotti developed an intimate photographic language capable of investigating the contradictions of reality to penetrate its secret lyricism. The entirety of the shots displayed in the exhibition reveals, from the outset, a new way of observing reality, engaging with the fleetingness of its moments: the journey through the halls invites the viewer to dialogue with their personal conception of time, sometimes immobile and astonished, sometimes fleeting and elusive. What emerges strongly is a happy and free Tina (happy because she is free), as she wrote to Weston in April 1925: a woman with a lively intellect and a surprising capacity for introspection, whose multifaceted nature appears capable of guiding her choices.

The exhibition, organized into six sections, aims to show the public the infinite facets of a photographer skilled in bypassing aesthetics to focus on ethics, developing an eloquent and personal visual code that took shape and evolved in a very short time, yet managed to leave an indelible mark on the historical and photographic heritage of the first half of the last century. The continuous dialogue with the photographs of Edward Weston, reflecting an extensive epistolary exchange between the two artists, narrates Tina’s obsession with photographic quality and her repeated declaration in 1929 of her intention to objectively record life in all its aspects. Numerous biographical photographs, imbued with narrative power, feature the faces of some notable personalities of the time and the artistic dimension in which Modotti immersed her soul and found her inspiration: the photographer and her mentor Edward Weston, artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, actress Dolores del Rio, revolutionary journalist Julio Antonio Mella, and politician Vittorio Vidali.

From the perspective of passionate and sincere activism, Tina used photography as an extension of her eye, a tool for social investigation and denunciation, with an expressive consistency capable of transcending art to give it as a gift to life, the life that, as she herself said, constantly struggled to dominate art. A true metamorphosis of life into art, which finds its photographic transposition in the famous calla lilies and delicate geometries on display, which Tina tries to convert into abstraction to preserve them in memory, leaving out superfluous elements to fervently reach the core of the sentiment. The intensity of the passion that guides Tina’s hand and eye is found among the faces and hands of the Mexican people, protagonists of an entire section, witnesses of a will for change and a necessary awareness, which in her vision become icons of potential social redemption. Life, art, and revolution: these are the keywords of the shots that capture the symbols of class struggle, workers, women of the people, gatherings, and details. Intense snapshots of the women of Tehuantepec, who, by nature walking quickly, tell of Tina’s desire to seek in an ancient society a new truth and a poetic sense that become for her an inexhaustible creative lifeblood; austere, in this sense, are the gazes of the children, who seem to penetrate the lens in an attempt to reach the soul of the shooter. To close the exhibition, a selection of portraits of Tina, including some of those she called immortal, made by Edward Weston. Observing them, one can hear the echo of Federico Marin’s words, who described her as “a mysterious beauty, devoid of vulgarity […], but not cheerful, rather austere, terribly austere. Not melancholy, nor tragic.” Fascination and mystery remain intact, as the words written in the letters, her peculiar gaze, and bold experimentation place Tina Modotti among the greatest interpreters of the human condition, captured in its infinite facets. The immersive nature of her shots, deriving from an innate empathy towards her subjects, becomes a voice capable of narrating to the viewer the infinite variety of the world and, simultaneously, its universality.

Text by Francesca Bogliolo