The Maternal Utopia in Tina Modotti's Modernist Madonna and Child

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1For an extended discussion of the modernist choran moment and its subsequent phenomenon of choran community, please see my book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (Susquehanna University Press, 2009). 2Please see John Taylor, Pictorial Photography in Britain 1900–1920 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and Shenval Press Ltd., 1978). 3Quoted in a letter to J. Dudley Johnston (3 April 1925). 4In Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage International, 1982), John Berger also argues that the photographic moment exists in a kind of liminal space between the movement of time and the stasis of the image: “A photograph preserves a moment in time and prevents it being effaced by supersession of further moments. In this respect photographs might be compared to images stored in the memory … remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant” (89). 5See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). 6See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). 7See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 8In the late 1880s, Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934) became incredibly successful as a New Woman photographer, with a husband and three children of her own. She is best known as a portrait photographer and Photo-Secessionist aligned aesthetically with her teacher and colleague Alfred Stieglitz, who proclaimed the supreme art of photography. The Pictorialists were the first proponents of art photography in their hope that the medium could transform the world; critical discussions of their work have resulted in modernist questions of artistic intention and control. Influenced by Impressionist painting, Pictorialists created diffused and romanticized images of nature and dramatic tableaux which often reflected the Victorian culture's fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites. Later, in the early part of the twentieth century, Pictorialists incorporated the realism of the personal eye, resulting in the transformation from Pictorial to straight photography. Pictorialist photographers often manipulated their images through stage-managing, costuming, and re-touching to elicit certain emotional responses from viewers. Some of Käsebier's best known images are those of mothers and children. 9According to Margaret Hooks in Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary, Modotti “suffered at not being able to have children … since fibroid tumours … made her unable to conceive thus far and kept her childless for the rest of her life” (205). Perhaps this biographical fact also explains the poignancy of her maternal images.