More on Modotti, and a rant

After waiting so long for Monica Bravo’s book, Greater American Camera, I am disappointed. Bravo’s heterosexist and liberal bias vibrates on every page. I don’t expect historical accounts to be “objective,” but Bravo tests the limits of my tolerance for bias. She names every man Modotti is said to have had sex with, but she gives short shrift to Modotti’s connections with other women; the word “Communist” must appear 60 times in Bravo’s description of Modotti’s politics, and Bravo repeatedly calls Modotti’s social justice photography “propaganda.” 

“Propaganda” smells of distortion, rumor, manipulation. The chapter on Modotti is entitled Photopoetry: Tina Modotti’s Art of Propaganda. I cringed when I read the title, but I wanted to give Bravo the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she would be more respectful of Modotti’s beliefs (obviously not congruent with Bravo’s) in the text? No. 

Does she call Diego Rivera’s work propaganda? No. Does she call Manuel Alvarez Bravo (possibly her grandfather?) a propagandist? No. Is Frida Kahlo a propagandist? No. But her final sentence in this 47-page essay on Modotti’s work is, “In it [her work] we see a revolutionary impulse expressed through art and propaganda [italics hers].” I would love to ask Bravo where she draws the line between art and propaganda, and why she finds it necessary to draw a line at all.

If you’d like to read a much shorter and less biased article about Modotti, here you go.

End of rant.

Bottom line: Bravo and I both agree that scaffolding is an important subject for Modotti, and that Modotti respects and photographs workers dwarfed by, endangered by, exploited by their surroundings. Modotti photographs men and women at work, often laboring for the profits of others. My photo today is another homage to her photography. Is it propaganda? (Her photo in Bravo’s book is the Extra.)

P.S. As you may observe in my photograph, it is RAINING! Hallelujah. It has been a long, dry, smoky time. Rain. A miracle. And yet these two men continue working on a rickety scaffold. But let me not veer into propaganda.