Lot Essay
This head of Modotti was to become a picture of great importance to Weston soon after he made the negative and printed it. Perhaps the straightforward and unmanipulated approach - a stark contrast to some of his work of but two years earlier - developed in his recently adopted home immediately appealed to the sensibilities he had developed in his Mexican exile. Or, perhaps, it was the circumstances in which the picture was made which reveals how closely tied his art had become to all aspects of his life at the time. In his Daybooks he recorded:
January 30. The night before we had been alone - so seldom it happens now. She called me to her room and our lips met for the first time since New Year's Eve. Then the door bell rang, Chandler (Weston's son) and a friend, - our mood was gone.
Morning came clear and brilliant. "I will do some heads of you today, Zinnia." The Mexican sun, I thought, will reveal everything. Some of the tragedy of our present life may be captured, nothing can be hidden under this cloudless cruel sky. She leaned against a whitewashed wall. I drew close...and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek - and then I captured forever the moment...
Let me see, f. 8 - 0 sec. K I filter, panchromatic film - how mechanical and calculated it sounds, yet really how spontaneous and genuine, for I have so overcome the mechanics of my camera that it functions responsive to my desires. My shutter coordinating with my brain is released in a way as natural as I might move my arm. I am beginning to approach an actual attainment in photography that in my ego of two or three years ago I had thought to have already reached.
Two weeks later, after he printed the negative, he wrote:
Febraury 14. The new head of Tina is printed. Along with Lupe's head it is the best I have done in Mexico, perhaps the best I have done at all. But while Lupe's is heroic, this head of Tina is noble, majestic, exalted; the face of a woman who has suffered, known death and disillusion, who has sold herself to rich men and herself to poor, whose childhood knew privation and hard work, whose maturity will bring together the bitter-sweet experience of one who has lived life fully, deeply and unafraid.
January 30. The night before we had been alone - so seldom it happens now. She called me to her room and our lips met for the first time since New Year's Eve. Then the door bell rang, Chandler (Weston's son) and a friend, - our mood was gone.
Morning came clear and brilliant. "I will do some heads of you today, Zinnia." The Mexican sun, I thought, will reveal everything. Some of the tragedy of our present life may be captured, nothing can be hidden under this cloudless cruel sky. She leaned against a whitewashed wall. I drew close...and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek - and then I captured forever the moment...
Let me see, f. 8 - 0 sec. K I filter, panchromatic film - how mechanical and calculated it sounds, yet really how spontaneous and genuine, for I have so overcome the mechanics of my camera that it functions responsive to my desires. My shutter coordinating with my brain is released in a way as natural as I might move my arm. I am beginning to approach an actual attainment in photography that in my ego of two or three years ago I had thought to have already reached.
Two weeks later, after he printed the negative, he wrote:
Febraury 14. The new head of Tina is printed. Along with Lupe's head it is the best I have done in Mexico, perhaps the best I have done at all. But while Lupe's is heroic, this head of Tina is noble, majestic, exalted; the face of a woman who has suffered, known death and disillusion, who has sold herself to rich men and herself to poor, whose childhood knew privation and hard work, whose maturity will bring together the bitter-sweet experience of one who has lived life fully, deeply and unafraid.