This Photography Which Is Not One: in The Gray Zone With Tina Modotti

This Photography Which Is Not One:
In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti
CAROL ARMSTRONG
Prolegomena: Speaking from the Body

June 25. I must take time to write about the reactions to my shell
prints, as written by Tina from Mexico after showing them to several
old acquaintances. First, to quote briefly the most salient remarks. My
God, Edward, your last photography surely took my breath away! I feel
speechless in front of them. What purity of vision. When I opened the
package I couldnt look at them very long, they stirred up all my innermost feelings so that I felt a physical pain.
Latersame morning
Edwardnothing before in art has affected me like these photographs. I cannot look at them long without feeling exceedingly
perturbed, they disturbed me not only mentally but physically. There is
something so pure and at the same time so perverse about them. They
contain both the innocence of natural things and the morbidity of a
sophisticated, distorted mind. They make me think of lilies and
embryos. They are mystical and erotic.1
So wrote Tina Modotti to Edward Weston concerning her reaction to his photographs of shells. Or rather, so Weston quoted Modott i react ing to his
photographs of shells, carefully entering sections of her letters to him from
Mexico, where she had remained after his final departure for California the year
before, in his photographic diaries. Of course, the so-called Daybooks are
1.
See Nancy Newhall, ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1961/1973),
vol. 2 (California), 1927, 4. The Shells in Mexico: Letters from Tina Modotti, p. 31. On the Daybooks,
see Shelley Rice, The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Art, Experience, and Photographic Vision, in
Beaumont Newhall and Amy Conger, eds., Edward Weston Omnibus: A Critical Anthology (Salt Lake City:
Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), pp. 18792. See also Amy Stark, ed., The Letters
from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston, The Archive (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona Research Series 22, 1986), and Margaret Gibson, Memories of the Future: The
Daybooks of Tina Modotti (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). It is worth remarking
that 1927, the year of the shell print episode, was also the year Modotti joined the Communist Party,
marking, among other things, the divergence between her path and Westons.
OCTOBER 101, Summer 2002, pp. 1952. 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
20
OCTOBER
something more than diaries; clearly written with posterity in view, they do much
more than log Westons day-to-day dealings in the darkroom, bedroom, studio,
and field. They const ruct t he myt h of Weston as Grand Master of t he
Photographic Beautiful.2 And they do so in relation to a series of ranked and
conquered lesser figures, of whom Modotti is the prime representative; indeed,
she serves as the voice, ventriloquized by Weston, of all that is mastered and
sublimated in his photography: the oracle of the Other.
In later entries, Weston went on to quote Modotti quoting other Others.
That same evening, Felipe and Pepe were carried away with the sensuousness
of the shells. The next morning Ren dHarnoncourt was reported (by Modotti to
Weston, who then reported it to himself) to see the shells as erotic too, to find
them disturbing, to feel weak at the knees in the face of them. On July 4, Diego
Riveras first breath-taking impression was described to Weston by Modotti, and
then entered in his Daybooks . . . These photographs are biological, beside
the aesthetic emotion they disturb me physically,see my forehead is sweating;
Rivera, says Modotti as recorded by Weston, went on to wonder if W. [was] very
sensual? . . . Finally, on July 7, Weston reported that Modotti reported that Jos
Clemente Orozco reacted to the shells by thinking first of Rodins Hand of God and
then, like everybody, including myself, . . . of the sexual act. In the context of
these entries quotations of quotations, that including myself is confusing: is
myself Orozco or Modotti? Or is it Weston himself ?until one realizes that it
couldnt be . . . or could it?
Well, no. In that same entry, Weston reacted to these layers of reactions,
reported at second and third remove. He interjected the following:
Why were all these persons so profoundly affected on the physical side?
For I can say with absolute honesty that not once while working with
the shells did I have any physical reaction to them: nor did I try to
record erotic symbolism. I am not sick and I was never so free from
sexual suppression. . . .
No! I had no physical thoughts,never have. I worked with clearer
vision of sheer aesthetic form. I knew that I was recording from within,
my feeling for life as I never had before. Or better, when the negatives
were actually developed, I realized what I felt,for when I worked, I
was never more unconscious of what I was doing.
No! The Shells are too much a sublimation of all my work and life to be
pigeon-holed. Others must get from them what they bring to them:
evidently they do!3
2.
On this myth, see Hollis Frampton, Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,
October 5 (Summer 1978), pp. 4869.
3.
Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 2, 1927, p. 32.
This Photography Which Is Not One
21
In the course of this elaborate dnegation, Weston admitted he was not blind to the
sensuous quality in shells, with which they combine the deepest spiritual significance:
indeed it is this very combination of the physical and spiritual in a shell like the
chambered nautilus, which makes it such an important abstract of life.
What, besides expressing the veneration, indeed the abject prostration of
others before the magisterial accomplishments of Weston, was the point of going
to such lengths to record precisely those reactions he most wished to deny?
Exactly that: to speak what he wished to suppress, to have someone elseseveral
someone elsesdo the speaking, so that what they voiced so plurally and
incoherently (so speechless[ly]) could be doubly expelled yet at the same time
expressed, and then emphat ically to reject their utterances, all the more
resoundingly for having sounded them in the first place. But not quite to silence
or subdue them. For what Weston enacts in his Daybooks entries of June and
July 1927 isand these are virtually his own wordsthe structure of sublimation
itself, complete with the component of close-to-the-surface repression contained in
it: the rising of the aesthetic up out of the erotic, the uplifting of base sensuality
into the authority of the sensuous abstraction, the distilling and purifying of the
bodily, in short, the making sublime of the sexual, wherein the erotic, the sensual,
the bodily nevertheless lies swooningforehead sweating and knees trembling
just beneath the sublimity of the perfect photograph. 4 From ejaculation to
counterejaculation, Weston affirms and negates and then affirms and negates again
the carnal substratum of his artistry with the camera. At the same time, protesting
too much, he speaks the return of the suppressed, reiteratively.
What of Modotti in all of this? For she, not Westonor rather, her photographs, not Westonsis the subject of this essay. Clearly Modotti colluded in
Westons view of himself and his photography in relation to others. She wrote the
letters, after all, helping to produce an image of Weston, even after the fact of
their intimacy, very much in tune with earlier photographs she had taken of him
in Mexico, when the two of them were together there in 1923 and 24. There
Weston stands with his view camera, sharp-eyed, commanding, singularly upright,
his outsized optical instrument the exaggerated phallic extension of himself,
morphing his body into the hard-edged implement of the artistic gaze. (Nothing
4.
Sigmund Freuds analysis of sublimation, as a psychological technique, related to but different
from repression, in which the childs sexual and corporeal investigations are elevated and converted
into the higher curiosities of the human arts and sciences, is most famously given in Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2: Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other
Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 63137. But in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), where he charts the development of normal
sexuality toward the primacy of a single erotogenic zone and a firm organization directed towards a
sexual aim attached to some extraneous sexual object (p. 63), Freud gives a definition of sublimation
even better adapted to our purposes in its relation to scopophilia, and to the eventual privileging of
sight over touch (with looking, however, ultimately derived from touching): as a diversion in the
direction of art, . . . interest . . . shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole
(I. The Sexual Aberrations, Touching and Looking, pp. 2223).
22
OCTOBER
could be further from the way Weston represented Modotti during the same
period, wearing blousy Mexican folk garb, nonchalantly dangling her camera like a
handbag, slouching against a Mexican adobe embankment with a Mexican
friendsignifying Latinicity, above all else, but also modelhood, the supplementarity of her camera, and her nonsingularity.)5 It is hard to know whether there
might not have been an unwitting element of spoof in Modottis earlier image of
Westonhe is so pompous and patently posed, replete with pipe in mouth
echoing the larger diagonal and lens of his view cameraand, if so, whether
Weston might not have shared in the satirizing of himself. But one thing is certain,
that by the time Modotti wrote to him about his shell prints in 1927 and no matter
how inadvertently funny both her and her friends reactions, and Westons recording
of and reactions to those reactions might be to us now, she was entirely serious,
and so was Weston.
5.
This comparison and one other (between Modottis Cloth Folds and Westons Circus Tent) are
suggested by the images gathered in Sarah M. Lowes Tina Modotti, Photographs (New York, Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995). In Westons photograph of her,
Modotti plays the role of Mexican (even though she was an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who was living
as an expatriot in Mexico), and thus in this image of her and in others several exoticisms are elided.
Left: Edward Weston. Tina Modotti and Miguel Covarrubias. c. 1924. 1981
Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Right: Tina Modotti.
Edward Weston with a Camera. c. 192324. Courtesy New Orleans Museum of Art.
23
What interests me most about Modottis letters to Weston concerning

Westons photography, as recorded by Weston in his Daybooks, is the way the
role they assign to Tina and her cohorts echoes the aesthetic tactics of her photographs in the period from 1924 to 1927. This is particularly true of those
photographs most closely related to Westons before and after himthe plant
close-ups, the architectural and other abstractions, the photographs of hands
and body parts. That is what I want to pursue herethe ways in which Modottis
photographic work in the New Vision mode manifests the same physical underbelly of that vision that she articulated in her letters: the haptics under Westons
optics, the corporeal soma of his aesthetic sublime, a photography weak at the
knees. Modotti the photographer has so often been overshadowed by her erstwhile lover, her own beauty as a body, her status as Latina par excellence, even
her image as avant-garde muse and comrade-in-arms, that it might seem an odd
choice to select: not the more directly political and reportorial workthe
Communist symbols and labor seriesthe work at the furthest remove from
Westons, which Weston most disdained, but her work as a Westonian aesthete. It
might seem peculiar, that is, to select for emphasis those images that appear to
confirm the image of Modotti as Westons sidekick.6
But what I want to explore here is precisely the difference of Modottis photography. And that suggests taking her work in relation to the norm supplied by
Westonsthe norm as both she and Weston construed it. It involves taking her
aesthetic choices seriously, adding them up to an aesthetic project that both
underwrote and unconsciously undermined the program of the straight photograph as Weston began to develop it in the year s dur ing which he was
together with Modotti. It suggests, too, looking at the ways in which Modottis
photography was determining for Westons as much as his was determining for
hers, and at the same time seeing how divergent each one was from the other
in their photographies. It proposes, finally, to find Modottis celebrated otherness in her photographs, rather than in her person, and to locate her sedition
in the subliminality of her formal strategies rather than in the politics that she
consciously avowed.
6.
The literature on Modotti is extensive, but with some exceptions it testifies more to the
romance of her persona and biography (one several times linked to that of Frida Kahlo) and her
iconic status for Mexico, for feminism, and for the left, than to the interest in her images: among
others, see Octavio Paz, Frida y Tina: Vidas no paralelas, Vuelta, September 1983, p. 48; Laura
Mulvey (wit h Peter Wollen), Fr ida K ahlo and Tina Modott i, Visual and Ot her Pleasures
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 81107; Ellen Melinkoff,
Who Was Tina Modotti?, Arts and Antiques 9 (1992), pp. 5863; Elena Poniatowska, Tinsima
(Mexico City: Era, 1992); Ricardo Toffoletti, Tina Modotti: Perch non muore el fuoco (Udine: Arti
Grafiche Friulane, 1992); Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (London: Bloomsbury,
1993); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary (London: Pandora, 1993);
Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999); and
most recently (and least biographically), Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).
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OCTOBER
Haptic Optics
I begin, not at the beginning, with Modottis earliest photographs, but at the
moment of the letters quoted in the Daybooks, and with the object of everyones
cited admiration, Westons shell prints, produced and received three years after
Modotti opened up this close-up vein and Weston began to mine it. The quintessential photograph in this series is the one that Weston, while admitting he was not
blind to the sensuous quality in shells, described as an important abstract, a
combination of the physical and spiritual, in other words the epitome of the
structure of sublimation articulated above: the Nautilus Shell. The Nautilus Shell
represents the distillation and refinement of Paul Strands ethos of the straight
photograph, as well as the advance-notice apotheosis of the values of the f.64 group,
when it formed five years later: sharpness, stopped-down aperture, and technophilia,
but also Westons cherished previsualizationseeing the final print in its full blackand-white tonal scale in the object when one looks at it to photograph itand its
later schematization by Ansel Adams in the form of the so-called zone system.7
At the same time it represents the reduction of the old luxury still lifethe
pronkstilleben with its array of expensive, imported objects, including the nautilus
cup beloved of Willem Kalf and others, demonstrating the intersection between
the artifices of Nature and Manto One: one single beautiful thing, its coiled,
elegant form perfectly contained, as in the dark velvet interior of a jewel box. It is
as if the rectangle of the photograph were that boxincarnating the union of the
artistries of sea creature and camera in its steely, opalescent gleam, at once
secreted pearl and emulsified silver, the one identified absolutely with the other.
Sliced by the knife before it is cut by the camera shutter, the nautilus is simultaneously halved and centered, so that its bisection and its singularity seem to be one
and the same, a natural fact surrendered up to the incisive eye of the photographer
who pierces the outer shell and sees to the very core of the thing. It is thus that the
nautilus shell yields the effect of its own essence and justifies its own name: an
utterly autonomous, perfectly interiorized, chambered shape, almost architectural in
its sectioning, and like the photograph itself a consummate blend of autogenerated optical surface and self-spawned inner structure, of the sensuous and
the rationalor the physical and the spiritual, as Weston put it. It is thus,
finally, that the Nautilus Shell harvested the reactions that it did, whereby others
were struck dumb by its sensuality while its author insisted on its sublimity.
Clearly, there was something about the nautilus shell that made its viewers
understand its mechanical-uterine form as an erotic figure and its penetration
by knife, eye, and camera as something like a sexual act, as if the photographed
7.
On the zone system, see Ansel Adams, The Negative (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, A New
York Graphic Society Book, 1981); and Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, A New York Graphic Society Book, 1983). See also Adams, Edward Weston (1964), in
Newhall and Conger, Edward Weston Omnibus, pp. 11723.
Weston. Nautilus Shell. 1927. 1981 Center for

Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
26
OCTOBER
shell were a body entered and possessed, and the camera eye a phallus: as if, without representing a woman, it were the ne plus ultra of the male gaze, seeing
deeper than the vaginal darkness that lies at the crux of so many of Westons later
nude compositions to the very womb, not of a female body, but of Nature herself.8
This effectof a voluptuary nature morte and a libidinous seeing to match it, of an
object reamed by the eye (ever so grandly)was enhanced by some of Westons
other shell prints, in which shells are shown in their glossy volumes, looking like
pearly flesh, and sometimes, when there are more than one, like sybaritic bodies
intertwined and interpenetrated.
For, just as clearly, and despite its insistent essentialism and singularityits
effect of the-thing-in-itselfthe Nautilus Shell made its viewers think of other
things besides itself: of lilies and embryos, the sexual act, Rodins high
sculptural erotics, and no doubt Westons other work as well. Indeed, the Nautilus
Shell also represents the climax of Westons series of close-up single objects running from the Excusado of 1925 through the Pepper of 1930 (not to mention the
Eggslicer, the Bedpan, the Artichoke Halved, the Onion Halved, the Cabbage Halved
(and Quartered), the Gourd, the Chard, the Winter Squash, the White Radish, etc.
and then later, the untitled body parts, breast, buttocks, feet, and so on). And
from the Excusado, that toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary
beauty, which Weston came upon in his Mexican household and described as
the human form divine but minus imperfections, the Victory of Samothrace
with chaste convolutions and . . . swelling, sweeping . . . finely progressing contours,
while his mnage mocked it and the housemaid polished it, to the sinuous Pepper
and other fruits and vegetables, which Weston, having culled them from the food
market, had to photograph before they rotted or his sons ate them, the photographer himself clearly thought of other things besides the-thing-in-itself, and sought
to make others think of them too. (Weston, for one, thought of beautiful
women, while denying that his mind held lecherous images.)9 What everyone
was thinking about, it seems, was the same relay between sexuality and sublimation,
expressed by a chain of abstractly beautiful yet evocatively carnal objects, each one
8.
Throughout his Daybooksthe entries are too frequent to cite hereWeston himself linked sexual to photographic conquest, repeatedly following comments about scoring with one woman or
another with remarks about getting one object or another properly on film, or vice versa.
9.
See Daybooks, vol. 1, October 21, 1925, p. 132, in particular. There Weston comments, with
regard to the Excusado: It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject
matter when I might be doing beautiful women or Gods out-of-doorsor even considered that my
mind holds lecherous images arising from restraint of appetite./But no! My excitement was absolute
aesthetic response to form. . . . /Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to
their culture. . . . In an entry of two days later (October 23, pp. 13233), he continues: Elisa had
only this morning polished up the bowl, though hardly in anticipation, so it shines with new glory.
The household in general make sarcastic remarks re my effortsBrett offering to sit upon it during
exposure, Mercedes suggesting red roses in the bowl, while both criadas believe me quite crazy. . . .
These remarks express the same structure of sublimation as those on the reactions to his shell
printswith the household representing the unsublimated functions of things that Weston labored
to transcend in his photography.
27
sublimely yet sexually photographed by the Master, each one calling up the other
in the eye of the mind.
The local inception of this series of photographs by Weston lay in Modottis
less masterful hands. For she made the earliest moves in this direction, beginning
in 1924, with the Roses and the Calla Lily, and continuing at least into 1925, the
year of Westons first such effort, the Excusado, with the Calla Lillies. These called
on the line of figural abstraction identified, not with Stieglitz, Strand, and the
straight photograph, but with Georgia OKeeffe and her blown-up genital
flowers, which like Westons single-object photographs reduced the floral still-life
that had been the traditional purview of the female painter to one (or two or
four) item(s), expanded to fill the entire field of the image.10 Modotti imported
that contracted/expanded floral field into the smaller domain of the modernist
photograph, thereby founding a fragmentary (matri)lineage that would continue
with the female member of f.32, Imogen Cunninghamwho, indeed, made it her
signature themeand culminate with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose single florals
exploited the hermaphrodit ic bisexualit y of the flower to express and to
unstraighten the erotics of the straight still life photograph. It was from
Modotti, then, that Weston got the idea for the close-up, frontal, view-to-the-core
photograph, rather than the other way around.
Yet such a chasm divides the aesthetic leanings of the two photographers
that this derivation is all but unseeable. And so fragileso far from imperious
are Modottis photographs that it is difficult to think of them as anything but
tributary; it is almost impossible to conceive of them as originary. For they have
none of the command of the full range of black-and-white that Westons photographs do, none of their exacting sharpness or optical purity, and none of
their cold, nacreous shine. Nor, for that matter, do they contain any of Westons
celebratory identification of the polished, streamlined object with the technogleam of the glossy photographs smooth, silvered paper, or his leveling of all
materialitiessoft and hard; animal, vegetable, and mineral; inorganic and
organic; industrial and biological; immortal machine and perishable fleshto
that one overr iding equat ion. And they have no claim to transcendence,
eitherto the photographs transcendence of time or the artists transcendence
of function through form, matter through metaphysics, or the sexed body
through sublimation.
Modott is Roses is by now and was even thena canonical image,
immediately recognizable, so often and so extravagantly admired that it hardly
bears further comment.11 And it is so close to the kitsch clicha Hallmark
10.
Like Weston, OKeeffe reacted to the sexual, gendered readings of her flowers with denials. On
OKeeffe, see Anne Middleton Wagner, OKeeffes Femininity, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism
and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and OKeeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 29103.
11.
See Noble, Commodity Feminism and the Reading of Roses, Tina Modotti, pp. 2858, for a
discussion of the reputation, valuation, and high sales of Roses.
Modotti. Roses. 1924. Courtesy

Throckmorton Fine Art, New York.
bouquet, gather ye rosebuds, a rose by any other name, a rose is a roseas to

almost yield to it completely. But it is early enough to be inaugural and exemplary
of the difference between Modottis and Westons photographic tastes, so it is
worth looking at here, again. The roses that fill the full frame of the photograph
are several, not oneat least four in all. Impossible to bisect themthey would
only have fallen apartthey are not sliced into with the sharp knife of the eye,
which is too diffuse and wandering in its attention to the photographs pliant field
of crevices and crannies for that. So Roses offers no clear cross-section, no formal
or metaphysical essence. It is, moreover, difficult to tell where one rose ends and
the other begins, since their petals are so layered and lapped. Indeed, not only are
the boundaries that separate them from their kin and their surroundings unclear
and their identities therefore indistinct, their status as single objects is from the
beginning uncertain, undermined by the petalled pluralism of each one of them.
They are all surface, crease, and curl, with neither center nor singularity, no
discernible structure and no contained volumetheir hollows are all shallow, and
every furl folds into a fissure, and vice versa, so that the distinction between
interior and exterior is indeterminate as well.
And the roses are all soft, poignantly past their best, the crinkled edge of
each petal, registered by the camera in delicate detail, marking its fall into
29
imminent decrepitude, its vulnerability to time, material decay, and the demise of
fleshly things. The photograph is subtle in its vanitas meditation, but gently
precise too, for together the four flowers chart different stages of the rose, from
the all-but-new bud at the lower left, to the two more open blooms above, one
heavier, denser, and flatter than the other, to the large, loose, overblown blossom
at the lower right, on its way to ruin and all but completely undone, especially in
comparison to the tighter rose adjacent to it. It is in that respect that Roses is not
transcendent in its opticality: it is too devoted to the frailty and mortality of what
it records, and to the very temporality that the photograph is supposed to freeze
and overcome. And it is too committed to the call of the hapticthe evocation of
the fleshy feel of its flowers, and the visual fields solicitation to the fingers: the
eyes desire to touch what it seesnot in a grasping but in a stroking, groping
wayand to close the gap between itself and its object, folding sensation into
sense datum and back again into sensation so that while certain knowledge of the
thing is lost, a kind of blind contact with it is gained.12 Roses, then, also courts the
unseeing end of the spectrum of sight, and in that way as well strays from the path
of mastery and sublimation soon to be laid out by Weston.
This fumbling of sight into unsightedness is best exemplified by Calla Lily,
undertaken in the year of Roses or a year or two thereafter. In some ways, Calla Lily
is closer, in its frontal singularity, formal readability, and even its shape, its focus
on the core of the flower, and its containment by the photograph, to Westons
Nautilus Shell of a few years later. Yet each of those terms of similarity must be
qualified, primarily because the depth of field of the photograph is so shallow and
so much of it out of focus, and because it inhabits the middle, gray zones of the
tonal scale of black-and-white photographythe area around and above what
Adams would define as zone 5 in a range from zero to ten, middle C on the
photographic piano. So rather than sharp and well-defined, it is blurry and
astigmatically softand thus its formal certitude is undermined. And rather than
demonstrating its bravura technique and its mastery of the difficulties of capturing
detail in the dark and light ends of the spectrumthose that must be conquered
by internalizing and applying an understanding of the laws of optics and chemistry,
and by deliberately contracting and expanding the tonality of the negative and
printit hugs the safe, easy center of photographic tonality, the undramatic
zone that is arbitrarily, and in Modottis case hesitantly, placed while the rest
12.
There are different kinds of haptic space that two-dimensional images can suggest. The first has
to do with the contents of perspectival space, and rests on the illusion of volumes that the hand can
grasp (cubic or sculptural space), as opposed to a purely optical surface, or retinal screen. (That is its
meaning in the work of Alois Riegl, and it is synonymous with the linear mode in Heinrich Wlfflins
writing.) The second, which is what I mean here, is in a sense the opposite of the first, having to do
with a fascination with the materiality of a textured surface and a nonvolumetric solicitation to touch,
which does not yield visual comprehension, and which in fact verges on a kind of blindness: close-up
rather than distantiated, caressing rather than encompassing, somatic rather than virtual, touch at
odds with sight rather than sight extending and sublimating touch.
falls accordingly. As a result, the flower is no more strongly distinguished from

its ground by means of tone than it is by means of edge-definition. Its zooming in
on its own core is compromised, as is its containment by the rectangle of the
photograph: only the curved lapping of the upper left part of the petal against its
underneath is sharp, while the dark lean of the erect stamen is fuzzy, disappearing
into the vague hollow of the flower that splays out into the imprecise gray of the
flowers face and finishes in an indefinite outer contour, nearly blending with the
edge of the photograph on all four sides. So while it is, like OKeeffes flowers,
more direct and literal about the sexuality of the form it records than any of
Westons photographs, at the same time it renders it informeboth irresolute and
somewhat amorphous, not to mention equivocal about the line of separation
between the phallic and vaginal aspects of the flower. But in the end, the deliberation involved in the production of Calla Lily is unclear; all that is certain about it
is its myopia.
Modotti. Calla Lily. 1924-26. 2002 The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Of the two, Calla Lilies is a more controlled, precise photograph, in that

sense the more successful yield of an intentional process. It is everywhere sharp,
including its background, against which the sinuous, Art Nouveau elegance of its
two long stems spread out into the two vessel forms of its flowers, and then taper
into curled points, the left one in particular dwindling into a linear twist traced so
sharply against its ground as to suggest a trailing flourish drawn by the tip of a
pen. Its black-to-white range is still narrow, but it is expertly and organically
condensed in the rising of the two flowers up out of their dark stems into their
pale blooms, one bright and luminous, the other more gray and dusky. And Calla
Lillies is flatter and more decorative than its single sister, different from Calla Lily
in its profile view and doubling of its flowers. Yet Calla Lillies explores the same
terrain as Calla Lily, only more concisely. Its linear precision focuses what the Calla
Lily also manages to convey for all of its out-of-focusness: the degrading of the
flowers edges, and the fading of its flesh. For where the lining up of Calla Lilys
Modotti. Calla Lillies. 1925.
Courtesy The Detroit Institute of Arts.
32
OCTOBER
tip and outer limits with the edges of its photograph makes one all the more
aware of its waning, the pen-point inscription of the withering end of the left one
of the two lilies sharpens that awareness into precarious form. And where the blur
of the Calla Lily nevertheless evokes the crinkled infirmity of its flower and calls
up other, similar sensations, such as the perfumed-crepe feel of old human skin,
so that its very verging on blindness is responsible for its tactile associations and
sensate memories, Calla Lillies cleaves its optically exact indexing of frailty and
flaw to the equally exact rendering of the abraded materiality of the wall that
forms the flat ground of the photograph. Indeed, the very grayness of Calla Lillies
unites the inevitably declining materialities of flower and wall, and so imbeds the
latter in the perfect smoothness of the photographs surface, that the one is
imbricated in the other, and contradicts its (false) claims to permanence.13
What Calla Lillies ultimately focuses, then, is the ground of difference
bet ween Modott is and Westons photographies: for Westons opt ics, his
technophilia and ageless essential forms, Modotti substitutes an attachment to
haptic matter, susceptible to aging as well as to toucha nearly manual rather
than a purely optical field. Or rather, Modotti pre figures Westons high formalism
with a lower materialismone that implicates the body at every turn rather than
transcending itundergirding his superstructure with her base. For everything
that Modotti yearned after in her photographs, Weston sought to overcome in his:
most particularly, her photographs technical modesty and imperfect optics, and
their clinging to flawed substance and declining matter, to things produced by
and solicitous of the hand rather than the eye alone, and to a sensuous physicality
never free of the poignance of its own transience. Weston would replace Modottis
collapse of the photographs pallid platinum surface into the uneven, chafed texture of handworked adobe (in Calla Lily, Calla Lilies, and in other photographs)
with the deep, dark, cosmic spaces surrounding his perfectly realized objective
forms, their materialities transmogrified and chastened into archival silver.14
The photograph that best exemplifies, indeed emblematizes Modottis difference from Weston in this regard is Cloth Folds of 1924. More than that, the
particular abstracting drive of Cloth Folds, in which the taut platinum surface of the
13.
Since its inception the photograph has been understood to preserve what it records, and thereby
prevent it from perishing: the insistence by photographers on the archival quality of their prints
(and of cert ain photographic emulsions, such as plat inum), is an extension of this view of
photography. Yet as Roland Barthes points out in La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris:
Gallimard Seuil, 1980), the photograph is actually extraordinarily subject to decay; it is indeed even
more unstable than other media. Modottis attraction to decaying, imperfect surfaces seems to suggest
something more akin to the latter view of photographynamely, a notion that the photograph is
caught up in the perishability of what it records, rather than transcending it.
14.
It should not be inferred from this comparison that I intend a contrast between Modottis work
in platinum and Westons in silver; both photographers tended to work in platinum early on and then
began to switch to the silver photograph. But it is the case that Modotti seems to have continued to
prefer the more delicate tonality of the platinum print, even when working in silver, while Westons
move out of platinum and into silver corresponded to a shift in tonality toward the cooler, more
dramatic black-to-white range of the silver image.
photograph itself seems to have slackened to produce a beige field of falling fabric,
figures the discrepancy between Modottis work more generally and the larger
tendencies of New Vision photography: her unsublimated attraction to a tactile field
and the flaws within it; her preference for frangible materiality over the metallic or
the adamantine, for the mutable and mortal over the immutable and immortal, and
for in-between gray tones over the full black-to-white range of what would be the
zone system; her photographs appeal to the hand and lack of distance from the
eye; her adherence to the surface of the photograph yet unwillingness to identify that
surface with pristine form, optical clarity, previsualization, or the technological
mastery of the cameras glass eye.15 In all of these ways, it couldnt be more different
from a related photograph by Weston from the same year, Circus Tent, which gives
dramatic black-and-white form to the tautly stretched fabric that it represents,
deemphasizing the warp and woof of that fabric in favor of the radiating lines made
by its sectioning. It self-reflexively demonstrates how the photograph transforms
15.
See Clement Greenberg, The Cameras Glass Eye, in Newhall and Conger, Edward Weston
Omnibus, pp. 8791, for a discussion of Westons photography in relation to the modernist values of
self-reflexivity and autonomy. It is Greenbergs argument that Westons photographs are not properly
photographic in their aspiring to those values, for in his view it is in the nature of the photograph to
be outwardly referential and anecdotal. And indeed, the modernist ethos of the straight photograph, as articulated by Paul Strand, demands that it remain objectively true to its referent, and that
that objectivity restrains the photographs capacity to function as pure subjective symbol; see Paul
Strand, Photography, in Nathan Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), pp. 13637; and The Art Motive in Photography, in Vicki Goldberg, ed.,
Photography in Print (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), pp. 27687. Weston would
have concurred with this, while at the same time working to transcend it.
Left: Modotti. Cloth Folds. c. 1924. 2002 The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. Right: Weston. Circus Tent. 1924.
Collection Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
34
OCTOBER
matter into design, and identifies its own surface, not with manual making, but with
the optical production of shape. By contrast, casting a cloth over its field of vision,
Cloth Folds identifies itself with occluded sight. Indeed, it counters the very abstraction signaled by its other title, Texture and Shadow, since its adherence to material
stands in the way of the dematerializing drive of optical abstraction, and refutes the
photographs claims to the latter by insisting upon its field of literal detail and its
indexical production.16 Is it too much to suggest, finally, that Cloth Folds also calls to
mind Freuds dictum that the only thing ever invented by woman was weaving?17
Simile, Metaphor, Metonymy: Something Other Than Equivalents
One of the prime concepts that paved the path out of the Pictorialist and
into the modernist model of the art photograph was that of the equivalent,
espoused by St ieglit z and implicated in the expressionism of the straight
photograph, from Strand to Weston, Minor White, Adams, and beyond. In the
logic of the equivalent, the meaning of a photograph is twisted out of the grip of
its referentcloud or horse groin or body part, shell or toilet or vegetableand
given over to the photographs formal content, the sentiments of the subject who
authored it, and the corresponding emotions of the viewer who sees it.18 In this
way, the photograph is induced to transform its metonymical reframing of the
world it represents with a metaphoric figuring of its authors soul: a picture of a
shell becomes not the shell that it records set in a new context, but a shape that is
metaphorically linked, either to sex, the fine feelings of the photographer, or the
metamorphosis of one into the other; while a picture of a urinal becomes the
16.
On the index versus the icon, see Charles S. Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in
Justus Buchler, ed., The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp.
98119; Roman Jakobson, Quest for the Essence of Language (1965), in Krystyna Pomorska and
Stephen Rudy, eds., Language in Literature (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 1987), pp. 41327; and Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index, The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196219.
17.
See Sigmund Freud, Femininity, in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23: New Introductory Works on Psychoanalysis and Other Works
(London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 132: It seems that women have made few contributions to the the
discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they
may have inventedthat of plaiting and weaving. (Freud goes on to give this self-admittedly
fantastic explanation for the phenomenon: Nature herself would seem to have given the model
which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the
genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on
the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together. Thus he characteristically elides the
cultural reasons for his assertion, reaffirms the Nature-bound status of Woman, and offers an argument
about limited female creativity that replaces the sublimation of the great masculine arts with a
structure more akin to repression, fetishism, and sexual suppression. At the same time he draws a link
between this feminine accomplishment and the female body, between textile and corporeality.)
18.
See Daniell Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography (New
Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1999). On Stieglitz and the equivalent, see also Rosalind Krauss,
Stieglitz/Equivalents, October 11 (Winter 1979), pp. 12940; and Allan Sekula, On the Invention of
Photographic Meaning, in Goldberg, Photography in Print, pp. 45273.
35
Victory of Samothrace, metaphorically tied to transcendence of lecherous proclivities and their conversion into the pure passion of photography itself.19 (There is a
certain tautology in all of this: the form of the modernist photograph is a symbol
of the authors feeling for form, and of its own formalism, or rather, its ability
to make its indexicality over into formalism.) Westons articulation of the structure
of sublimation in his Daybooks commentary on the reactions to his photographs and his feelings about them is a perfect expression of the reasoning of
the equivalent.
But Westons photographs are simpler in their symbolism than his words
suggestcertainly they are simpler than Stieglitzs equivalentsand suggest
something even more akin to simile than to metaphor. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary (1971 edition), a metaphor is a complex figure of speech in
which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable; it is not literal, figurative, and
older definitions of it suggest that it involves an alteration of a word from the
proper and natural meaning to that which is not proper, and yet agrees with it by
some likeness which appears to be in it. A simile, by contrast, is simply a comparison of one thing with another, involving likeness, resemblance, similarity. A
metaphor is preeminently linguistic, it is predicated on the symbolic, arbitrary
operations of language, and some would argue that it is applied with much more
difficulty to the photograph, with its indexical properties, than to painting, for
example, whose iconic status involves an at least partly arbitrary relation to the
referent. A simile, on the other hand, circles around empirical comparisons
between similar looking objects whose resemblance to one another has subjective
implications but is founded on an objective likeness. Where the metaphor works
with verbs as well as nouns, can be adjectival and adverbial, and constructs figures
around whole sentences if not paragraphs and parables, the simile involves mainly
nouns. And where the metaphor never directly states the likeness that it constructs
(which is and isnt in it: it does and does not exist in the objects alluded to), and
is entangled in a mercurial slippage between figures, properties, and actions,
between signifiers and signifieds, words and referents, in which that which is
natural and proper to a sign alters into that which is notone thing is another
19.
On metonymy and metaphor, see Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language
(The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 7096; cited and summarized in Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the
Equivalent, p. 9: A metaphor relies on substitutions of comparative relationships, whereas a metonymy
relies on substitutions of contiguous relationships. Said another way, metaphors transform an objects
meaning without changing its context. . . . Metonymy, on the other hand, transforms an objects meaning by indicating a different but related context. (See also Jakobson, Two Aspects of Language and
Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, in Pomorska and Rudy, Language in Literature, pp. 95114, in
particular, V. The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles, pp. 10914.) It may be claimed that photography is by nature first and foremost metonymic in its substitutions, for it depends upon an
original contiguity with its referents, and produces new meanings for its objects precisely by giving
them new contextsin other words, that there is an integral relationship between the indexicality of
the photograph, its cutting out of the world, and its metonymic operations. It is also the claim of this
essay that metaphor slides into metonymy in a way that the simile does not.
36
OCTOBER
the simile always says like and never threatens to change anything into anything
else: a cloud is like a sand dune is like a womans haunch is like a bedpan is like a
shell is like a uterus is like a urinal is like a classical sculpture is like a beautiful
woman, and so on back around again. But in the structure of the simile those
objects never turn into anything other than themselvesthey must always remain
the same as themselves in order to be similar to that which they resemble: so while
it may be like a body in the throes of ecstasy, a shell is still clearly a shell, in a
photograph by Weston.20
And a rose is a rose. Or is it? Is Modottis Roses a simile, or a metaphor? And
when Gertrude Stein wrote those famous words in the decade before Modotti
turned to photography, did she mean to refute the power of the metaphor to alter
things and transfer meaningsthe power of the rose to be something elseor
did she mean to underline the altering and transferring capacities of the
metaphor, to oscillate between embracing and negating them, to stress and at the
same time destabilize the separation between language and its world of referents,
between the word rose that changes and the thing rose that does not? Or did she
mean to suggest, through negation and reiteration, that indeed there is some sort
of association between the subjective changeability of the word, as the signifier is
uttered in the mouth and the signified resonates in the mind and memory, and
the temporal, corporeal changeability of the object in the world, which in fact
never stays the same as its name? I suspect, from the context of Steins poetry,
which explores the physicality as much as the conventionality of language, the
interaction between sense and sign, the interplay between the literal and the
imaginative, that the answer is all of the above.21
As for Modottis Roses and other photographs, the answer is inflected by the
fact that they are photographs, not poems (and not paintings either), and by the
fact that they are different kinds of photographs from Westons simile-driven
20.
It is otherwise, for example, in contemporary work by the Surrealists, some of which is
remarkably close to Westons in its formssee Man Rays work in particularbut which uses the
propert ies of the photographic medium to turn one object into another. See Krauss, The
Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 87118; and Corpus
Delecti, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington,
D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), pp. 57100. This constitutes one of the
fundamental differences between Westons photography and European work that coincides with and
superficially resembles itin addition to Surrealist work, Marcel Duchamps Fountain (particularly as
photographed by Stieglitz) comes to mind in relation to Westons Excusado, as does Lzsl MoholyNagys appropriated shell X-rays and nebula in his 1925 Bauhaus book, Painting Photography Film, in
relation to Westons Nautilus Shell of 1927.
21.
The context of Steins famous phrase, rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is the erotic poem
Lifting Belly (191517), in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., The Yale Gertrude Stein (New Haven and London,
Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 454; see p. 35 in particular. In the context of the poem, where a rose
is not only a rose, the phrase rose is a rose . . . works both to negate and reaffirm the operations of
metaphor, both with and against the grain of its own literalist assertion, while also setting the linguistic
figure of the rose, as well as its crossing out, against the somatic ground of the body. See also Catharine
R. Stimpson, The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein, in Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western
Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 3043.
37
equivalents for his art-sublimated ardor. Certainly, the labial field of Roses suggests
the vulva, as much by a history of feminine association as simple resemblance. And
the Lilies have their phallic, vaginal, and uterine resonances, though in that case
there is a literal, if mixed-up, relationship between the double sexing of the flower
and it s evocat ion of human sexualit y. And Modott i was interested in the
metaphoric status of other things that she photographed, such as the witchs
claw of the 1925 El Manito, altering desert plant into hags talon by photographic
agency.22 Later she would be even more directly symbolic, as in her photographs
of hammers, sickles, and sombreros; bandolier, corn, and guitar. But Modotti
established no chain of like but unchanging forms, as Weston did, and was much
more often given to the functional status of the things she recordeda vessel is
just that, in a photograph of 1926 of a woman carrying an olla; moreover, its
femininity is established, not by the Surrealist device of turning a woman into a
spoon and a spoon into a woman, but by plain use and physical contiguity. Indeed,
Modotti tended to emphasize the metonymic relationship, not only between photographs and the world they record, but also between objects within any given
photographthe olla is carried by and sits on the shoulder of a woman rather
than looking like her or becoming a figure for her; a woman is a vessel by literally
being oneby carrying one baby inside a patently pregnant belly and another
under her arm and on her hip, and so on.
There is one photograph by Modotti, from her 1924 series of interior views
of the convent at Tepotzatln, that has a kind of metaphoric potentiality to it:
Interior of a Church.23 At least, its effect on me has always been to evoke the creases
of a bodily juncture, like that of a groin or armpit, although it is not quite as
specific a resemblance as that. Comparison with a photograph by Weston of just
such a meeting between female chest and arm can serve to illustrate what I mean,
while at the same time pointing to the absurdity of the proposition, church-vault
is like armpit when applied to Modottis photograph, and underlining again the
critical difference between her photography and Westons. For what I would argue
here is that Modottis photography eschews the simile and shuttles unstably
between metaphor and metonymy, depending on a phenomenological relay
between subject and object and inducing an empathetic, mnemonic interplay
between the physicality of the body and the corporeality of the world. Meanwhile,
22.
Weston called it witchs claw, while Modotti called their maid Elisas hands witchs clawssee
Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, pp. 24, 28.
23.
The series of photographs of Tepotzatln to which Interior of a Church belongs led into Modottis
involvement in the Mexican Renaissance, as among other things a documenter of indigenous Mexican
art and then of the Mexican muralists, and as a photographer for Mexican Folkways and El Machetesee
Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, pp. 25ff. A photograph of the inside of a tower at Tepotzatln, Interior
of a Church was also an experimental photograph that Weston reluctantly admired: it was produced
with an enlarged positive from which a negative print was made, and then mounted upside-down, thus
testifying to Modottis interest in inversion and suggesting that for her the photograph was a play on
abstraction more than a simple document. (See Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, p. 24.)
Modotti. Interior of a Church.

1924. Courtesy Page Imageworks:
Tony and Merrily Page.
it lays a contradictory materiality over and under the opticality of the modernist
photograph, in such a way as to shift and undermine the workings of the equivalent.
Interior of a Church evokes the interiority of the body by being an interior, and
calling up the inhabitation of other interiors by ones own body, making one
remember the touch if not smell of damp, thick old walls, and indeed the resonance
of the spaces they create. From there it is a short step to making the association
with the reflexive feel of ones own flesh, and the humid contact of the body with
itself. Yes, one may note the visual resemblance between the complex groining of
the wall where it meets and slides into the ceiling, the crotch-effect of the corner
and its adobe craquelure in Modottis image on the one hand, and on the other
the underarm and its bodily hair as it meets the side of the torso in Westons
photograph. There, of course, it is the breast that is the object of the picture, its
carnality and genital association at once enhanced by its framing by underarm
hair and transcended by its cropping into shape and texture and its luminous
decontextualization, though its identity as what it isa breastis never relinquinshed; it is clearly punctuated by the nipple. (The bit of light entering the hole
in Modottis vaulted nook, marking its inversion of volume, makes it something
like a negative of Westons image.) One might be tempted to say that Modottis
photograph uses its architecture to invoke a Cubist abstraction, all convex and
39
concave angles, of the body that Weston represents so often. But in the end it is
not so much that Interior of a Church visually resembles an underarm (such a direct
likeness would not come to mind, I think, without the photograph by Weston,
which was made a decade later than Modottis) as that it summons the body up by
other than strictly visual means. Perhaps it gives pictorial expression to a verbal
term such as that of the groin vault. But again, it does so by conjuring the bodys
contiguity with close corners, its adjacency to rough walls, its contact with uneven
floors and proximity to low ceilings: it images vicinity rather than producing
visual similitude. And rather than belonging to a chain of photographic similitudes, as do Westons photographs, it calls upon a narrower, contiguous series of
images of heavy adobe interiors from the Church at Tepotzatln, including
arches, tiled floors, stairways, and cracked, degraded walls, as well as other
wooden doors and Modottis well-known depiction of a wooden staircase. Finally,
of all the photographs by Modotti discussed so far, it is one that is the most insistent about the haptic materiality of the groined forms that it represents, again
underwriting its modernist commitment to abstract visualization with a base
attraction to matter, its devotion to the disembodied camera eye with a root inclination toward manual facture.24
24.
On the subject of modernisms own unconscious pulsation toward and against materiality, see
Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1997.
Weston. Nude, 1935. 1981 Center for Creative

Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
40
OCTOBER
Some fifty years later a young American woman working in Rome,

Francesca Woodman, would spell out some of what is implicit in Modottis photography. In her Roman photograph of a kneeling female body cornered behind an
old wall with a calla lily propped up against it, she brings together several of the
components found in Modottis work. As if seeking to enunciate the femininity of
interiors and flowers and to literalize old metaphors for the femininethe interior,
the flower (and elsewhere the shell)she lays them side by side, for comparison perhaps, but also to make plain the importance of contiguity, indeed to see
what happens when metaphoric connections are inflected and contaminated by
the relations of metonymy. Throughout her work Woodman, too, was drawn to
worn walls and decayed interiors, but in almost all of her photographs the connection to the female body is explicit, because the female body is shown lying against
those surfaces and inhabiting those interiors. In this photograph in particular, the
lower part of the female torso comes in physical contact with the grounda
nicked, jointed tile surface slanting up to meet the upper edge of the photograph
in deep shadow (where the vulval shape of the inverted sleeve of a cast-off garment
is dimly seen), sloping down to join the dirty lower, and everywhere the left edge
of the image, and in general eliding the distinction between surface and depth
and then is half blocked by the sharp edge of a scraped and pitted wall whose vertical surface takes up most of the right side of the photograph and lines up with the
full right edge of it, while joining indeterminately with the floor toward the middle
of the bottom edge, and dividing the photograph in two. Thus the shadowy groin of
the torso is tied, not only to the shadows of the interior space, the inside-out folds of
a frock, and the inner recesses of the lily folded in on itself (with its phallic stamen
disappearing into it just as the blur of the hand above vanishes onanistically into the
body of which it is part), but also to the interiorized groining of wall and floor, and
of the photograph. Thus the female bodys touching of itself is contiguously tied to
its touching of the floor, the floors meeting with the wall, the flowers lying against
its surface, and its stretching to the limits of the photograph and the blind field
beyond.25 And thus the old ascription of surface and interiority, invisibility,
mercuriality, and of course untranscended carnality as contradictory but related
properties of the feminine is here tested photographically.26
25.
See Barthes on the champ aveugle of the photographthat which is just outside the frame
of the photograph, invisible in it yet determining of it, and according to Barthes crucial to the erotics
of the photographLa chambre claire, p. 91.
26.
For a catalogue of feminine metaphors, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans.
H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): Dreams, Fears, Idols, pp. 13998. On Woodman,
see Rosalind Krauss, Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets, Bachelors (Cambridge and London: MIT
Press, October Books, 1999), pp. 16177; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Just Like a Woman, Photography at
the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), pp. 23855; and Margaret Sundell, Vanishing Point: The Photography of Francesca
Woodman, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in,
of, and from the Feminine (Boston, Cambridge, and London: Institute of Contemporary Art/MIT Press,
1996), pp. 43539.
Francesca Woodman. I.152/

Roma, May 1977August 1978.
Trustees of Princeton University.
Perhaps Woodmans photograph represents, within its frame, the conversion

of the metaphor into the simile by metonymic meansthe female body is like a
sleeve, like a lily, and like an interior space because they share that space: there they
are, side by side, you can see for yourself. (Only occasionally did Weston make his
likened forms contiguous by having them inhabit the same photographic spacea
shell cradled in a concave fold of beach rock, a female pubis set against the beginnings of a cave on another beach, a female body sprawled on dunes of desert sand.
More usually, his forms evoke each other across photographs.) But Woodmans
photograph also shows the discrepancy of metaphor and simile, and their difference
from metonymy: for once it is converted into a cont iguous likeness. The
metaphoric femininity of the lily, for instance, is too obvious and literal (as well as
too outright and too conflicted in its phallicism) to continue working its old
evocative magic. Meanwhile the contiguity of young body with old wall marks a
divide between likeness and physical nearness, similitude and inhabitation.
Modotti, who was young too when she made her photographs of old walls, spelled
out none of the met aphor ic similar it ies bet ween cont iguous things that
Woodmans photograph does. What she did do was to bring the equivalent back to
earth, materialize its dematerialized forms in the evocation of physical, not spiritual,
feelings, make its resonances those of the body rather than the disembodied
intellect, and ultimately refute its refutation of the metonymic, indexical condition
of the photograph, by contradicting its purely optical status, its manufacture by the
eye alone, its formal delectation and symbolic coding by the eye of the mind.27
27.
Indeed, Westons and Modottis photographies may be understood as proposing two contrary
self-definitions of the photographic medium: as optical on the one hand, and indexical on the other.
On t he quest ion of modernisms different medium self- definit ions, see again Krauss,
Equivalents/Stieglitz.
42
OCTOBER
Occupation, Housewife
Occupation, Housewife: so Tina Modottis profession was described on her
death certificate in 1942. Neither actress, model, photographer, nor political activist,
all of which were her occupations at one time and another, but housewife.28 We
have cause to doubt that Modotti would have identified herself as such. Yet there
are photographs from the year of Westons shell photographs that do suggest a
certain identification with the domestic work of the criada, such as Hands Washing
(Labor I), and more generally, with the physical labor of the female worker, as in
Hands Resting on a Tool. (It is tempting to read the hands in Hands Resting on a
Tool as male hands, in binary contrast to those depicted in Hands Washing, which
seem self-evidently female because of the work they perform, and thus to understand Modotti as engaging in a photographic analysis of labor as at once classed
28.
See Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, p. 46. Modotti died in Mexico in 1942, three years after
returning there, following her political imprisonment in 1929, and her subsequent exile to Berlin,
Moscow, Paris, and Spain.
Above: Modotti. Hands Washing. c. 1927. 2002 The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. Right: Modotti. Hands Resting on Tool.
1927. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
43
and gendered, as she did in her marionette series. But closer inspection of the
blurred background of cloth in Hands Resting on a Tool suggests a Mexican
womans belt-seamed and pleated shift, and leads to another possible understanding of the hands themselves, which against that ground and under their
caked and creased dirt begin to read as the slender, relatively hairless hands of a
woman, while their restful pose, despite the apparent masculinity of the tool they
hold, begins to be coded as feminine. Or perhaps one might understand the
resting upper hand as feminine and the fisted, thickened lower hand as masculine? All of which still suggests an analysis of labor as at once classed and
gendered.) Certainly the washing hands remind one of the remarks recorded by
Weston in 1925 concerning the housemaid toil of cleaning and polishing the
bathroom to ready it for use and aesthetic transformation, and in general the
function of his household to support and stand for the unsublimated ground
shopping, buying, eating, rotting, cleaning, using, housekeepingon which he
performed his work of sublimation: the back of domestic labor on which the
work of art is built.
44
OCTOBER
In the year prior to the making of the Excusadothe point where Westons
series of similes really beganWeston made a photograph of Modottis hands,
folded against her kimonoed stomach. Cropped so that only the line of the hands
against the patterned field of the kimono is seen, this photograph belongs to the
moment when Weston was still somewhat in the sway of his earlier Pictorialism
the softened hands and the kimono suggest that influence, if the close, flattened
cropping of the photograph does not. Hands, Mexico belongs to a set of images in
which the kimono is used, like a theater curtain, to enframe and isolate parts of
Modottis body and begin the work of transforming her body and Westons photography into modernist icons. It also references Stieglitzs serial Portrait of
OKeeffe, particularly his series of photographs of her hands, resting, sewing, moving
like birds in flight, posed against her body or pulling her shift apart and thus index-
Weston. Hands, Mexico. 1924. Center for

Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
45
ing her models performance, situated in relation to her own art work and sometimes in relation to an automobile wheel, a symbol of modernity commensurate
with the camera. If Stieglitzs Portrait of OKeeffe limits the dematerialization
and vertiginous abstraction of the equivalent in its attachment to always-recognizable
and discernibly oriented body partsface, neck, and chin, breast, stomach, and
thighshis photographs of her hands come closest to the disorientation and
subjective expressionism of the cloud series.29 Weston, for his part, would not often
pay attention to handsthey were not, it would appear, a favorite female body
partbut he did learn the lesson of the bodily equivalent from Stieglitzs Portrait
and applied it more extensively to the many bodies he recorded than Stieglitz did,
dividing up the bodies of all of his mistresses, beginning with Tina, into heads,
breasts, buttocks, thighs, legs, and feet, some more disoriented than others (such as
the photograph of the breast discussed in the previous section), but all of them
cropped so as to isolate the body part from its larger context, and all of them
mediating between the expressionist formalism of the equivalent and the referential literalism of the sharply focused straight photograph.
Modotti posed for Hands, Mexico when she was beginning to make the
photographs discussed in this essay. I wonder if she thought of it when she made
her own photographs of hands three years later. Perhaps she did, perhaps she
didnt, but her awareness of the aesthetic significance of photographed hands
seems undeniable. And the resemblance between Hands Resting on a Tool and
Hands, Mexico is remarkable: as if Modotti had taken the aestheticized fragment of
the hands, exoticized by both their title and the Japoniste field against which they
are set, substituted plain cotton for decorative fabric and masculinized workaday
hands for the ladys long, feminine, do-nothing fingers, inverted the hands
relationship to one another and to the coordinates of the photograph, given
them a tool to hold rather than merely resting them against the body and each
other, and thereby brought the visual field of aestheticism back down to the
ground of manual labor. Hands Washing resembles Hands, Mexico much less; nevertheless, it is pointed in its debasement of the Stieglitzian bodily equivalent,
inverting the usual relationship between dark field and light fingers into dark
scrubbing knuckles and white scrubbing rag, bringing the body low and the vertical field of the photograph down to the literal ground of the floor that is being
soaped and scrubbed, and effectively crossing out the expressionist elegance of
the hand photograph with the manual mark of domestic drudgery. Both sets of
hands, that is, work as desublimatory gestures, emblems of a larger project of
dragging the modernist photograph down from its function as a high expression
of artistic spirit to the material realm of the body. Both photographs speak to a
field of contiguity between hands, tools, and materials, a realm of physical relations
between body and world that goes beyond the frame of either imagerather than
the purely optical relation between the body and itself functioning as the sign of
29.
See Georgia OKeeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978).
46
OCTOBER
the formalist photographs internal relation to itself, as in Hands, Mexico. And

both pairs of hands inscribe their photographic devotion to the counterterrain of
the haptic.30
That devotion is emblematized in a photograph belonging to a series of
images of Mexican peasant mothers with their infants from around the same time
as Hands Washing and Hands Resting on a Tool. In Baby Nursing, the cheek and forehead of a female infant rhymes in reverse with the contour of the breast that it
nurses, while its palpating hand makes flesh-to-flesh contact, and a differentiated
field of fabric (plain cotton, dotted babys dress, woven flax) at once frames and
isolates body parts (breast, hand, cheek, ear, hair) and focuses the contact
between them, while underlining their closeness and reinforcing their sheer
physicality. This physicality is communicated through the stretched, pendant
volume of the milk-distended breast, the sucking, wide-open mouth felt rather
than seen, the pudgy creases and white nails of the dark infant hand, the eyelash
of the half-open eye, the fine hair lying against the cheek in front of the ear and
implying the nape of the neck behind it, the intricate coiling and crevicing of the
ear itself, the piercing of its lobe by the sharp metallic curve of the earring, not to
mention the cuff that makes contact with the wrist, the cloth that makes contact
with the breast on all sides, and the warp and woof of the material that supports the
weight of the childs head from behind and beneath, again not so much seen as felt,
and implied beyond the limits of the photograph. More than any other image by
Modotti, Baby Nursing condenses the conversion of the sublimated formalist field of
the photograph into a tactile, materialist, corporeal one, the shifting of form into
tact, the distanced optics of formal expression into the boundary-crossing haptics of
empathetic physical feeling, zeroing in on the short-circuited relay between touching, groping hand and close-seeing, short-sighted eye that informs the rest of her
photography. And it does so against a bodily ground that can only be described as
inescapably, essentially feminine, or female.
Coda: Femininity in the Field of Vision
In their classed subject-matter, Hands Washing and Hands Resting on a Tool (what
we might call Labor I and II) suggest the politics that inform Modottis formal strategies; they propose a connection between her Marxism and her desublimated
formalism. At the same time, Modottis photographs predict some of the stances of
later feminism with regard to the image: Baby Nursing, in particular, speaks to the
gendering of her project. Well after the fact of these photographs, a female gaze
has been theorized in contrast to the so-called male gaze of cinematic culture, with
its gendering of the subject and object of the look as male and female, respectively;
its binary opposition between the positions of masculine identification and feminine
30.
On hands and the haptic in Modottis photography, see Noble, Tina Modotti, in particular pp.
6774. There are many points of convergence between my essay and Nobles recent book on Modotti,
but ultimately they serve rather different arguments about Modottis photography.
Modotti. Baby Nursing. c. 1926-27. 2001

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
otherness; its triangulation of voyeuristic camera, narrative protagonist, and

fetishized female body; its phallic optics of possession and sublimation.31 That
female gaze is characterized, always in relation to the male gaze, as follows: as a
crossing of the positions of identification and otherness by way of the empathetic
closing of distance between the subject and object of the gaze; and instead of the
triangulation of camera, protagonist, and body, a collapse of camera and body, an
identification with the film screen or photographic surface rather than either a
protagonist or the camera, and a substitution of a liminal, haptic space for the
technique of optical distantiation.32
31.
For the classic description of the male gaze, see Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp.
1426. See also E. Ann Kaplan, Is the Gaze Male?, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York
and London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 2335. (Mulvey never uses the phrase the male gaze, though she
does speak of the male unconscious and the gaze of man.)
32.
On the possibility of a female gaze, see Mary Ann Doane, Film and the Masquerade: Theorising
the Female Spectator, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 75872. See also
Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory, in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New
Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 23862.
48
OCTOBER
At a moment prior to their theorization, none of these characteristics would

have been conscious feminist strategies. But they might flow from the cultural
positioning and psychological constitution of the female subject, and from her
double consciousness of herself as simultaneously a subject and an object, mentally
before the camera as well as behind it, at once in possession of and a part of a field
of vision that she is less likely to understand as hers alone.33 And they are the characteristics of Modottis photography: such is the field of vision, her photographs seem
to suggest, of the masters model, used to lying prone on the ground, indissociable
from her body and the surfaces with which it comes in contact. It is also the field of
vision of those assigned to the artists household, such as Modotti herself once
again, for whom artistic sublimation is always cut with the everyday chores that
both support and undermine it, pulling away at it like undertow.
But more than anything else, Modottis photographs recommend a feminist
reading along the lines proposed by Luce Irigaray: a photography which is not
one that corresponds to her sex which is not one. The outline of that sex, as
Irigaray gives it, is as follows: the negative, the underside, the reverse of what
she calls phallomorphism; a defect in this [phallomorphic] systematics of
representation . . . in its scoptophilic lens; an autoeroticism constituted by the
fact that Woman touches herself all the timeby the contact of at least two
(lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of
distinguishing what is touching from what is touched; the thickness of that
form, the layering of its volume; a sexuality, always at least double . . . it is
plural; in short, a different economy, determined by friction, attracted to
blurring, the inside/outside of the economy of desire marked by idealism.34
Like the female gaze in relation to the male gaze, Irigarays different
economy is by definition constituted in relation to the idealist one of form, the
predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of
form that describes phallomorphism.35 And as much as it can be and has been
characterized as an essentialist formulation, defining female sexuality according
to the physical, Nature-given attributes of the female sex organ(s), seemingly
reducing Woman to her genital essence, the two (lips) of her vagina, and
differentiating her accordingly, Irigarays sex which is not one must also be
understood as a strategic intervention in the mainstream, phallogocentric
construction of the human subject and psyche, as well as in Western metaphysics
and aesthetics, which is to say in Western idealism and formalism.36
33.
An objection can be raised that all subjects are so constitutedsee Jacques Lacan, The Mirror
Stage as Formative of the Function of I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, crits: A Selection,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 18. The answer to that objection would be that
the female subject is trained by her culture in the view that that split subjectivity is her gendered lot,
not to be transcended, unified, or subjected to the illusion of command.
34.
See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), pp. 26, 24, 27, 28, 29, 112, 111, 110.
35.
Ibid., pp. 2526.
36. On the question of feminist essentialism, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and
Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).
49
The same may be said of Modottis photography, on all counts. Indeed,

Irigarays characterization of the sex which is not one may be converted into a
description of Modottis photography, by substituting photography for sex,
and applying the terms of that sex to Modottis photographs: which represent
the negative, the underside, the reverse of Westons sublimated phallomorphism,
the defect in his scoptophilic lens; which are marked in their tactility, and in
the difficulty of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched in the
tactile fields to which they are drawn (as in Cloth Folds, Interior of a Church, and Baby
Nursing); which are characterized by thickness and layering (as in the Roses);
which show a devotion to the double and the plural (as in Calla Lillies and again
Roses) rather than the one of form; which are, in short, determined by friction,
given to blurring (as in Calla Lily), and suggestive of the inside/outside of
Westons idealist economy of desire. As these remarks already suggest, the
different economy of Modottis photographs must also be understood in relation
to Westons, as an intervention in the photographic aesthetics that he articulated
so masterfully:37 in short, a counterformalism to oppose his formalism, with its
predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of
form, a haptics to contravene his optics.
Nothing, however, suggests that Modottis different economy was a conscious
strategy of sabotage; in that it is unlike Irigarays later formulation of the sex
which is not one, which, in the context of the 1970s womens movement,
describes a feminist project of deliberate subversion at the level of the psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses to which she addressed herself. Instead,
Modottis photography which is not one would have to be understood in terms
of contrary aesthetic leanings, unconscious resistance, a visual dialogism that
remained untheorized and indeed largely unverbalized. And again, though it is no
more inevitable in the female photographer than the female gaze articulated
above it is descr ipt ive of Modott is photography, but not of Imogen
Cunninghams, for instanceif one were seeking an explanation for it, it would
have to be according to the different psychic formation and culturation of the
female subject, rather than the biological givens of her body. Which nevertheless
comes very close to an essentialist line of argument about the femininity, or
femaleness, of Modottis field of vision, just as Irigarays attempt to revise discursive
formations is redolent of an essentialist rhetoric about sexual difference.
And just as Irigarays central imagethe sex which is not oneexpresses
the definitional instability at the heart of the feminine as well as the unclear
37.
This is the view of the defects that constitute Modottis work that I preferto another account
which suggests itself: that Modottis photography testifies to a lesser mastery, a failure of quality
control, an absence of genius, and a lack of access to the psychic formation necessary for greatness;
on this question, see Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, Women, Art
and Power, and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 14578. Likewise, Irigaray substitutes
her formulation of the sex which is not one for the psychoanalytic/feminist construct of lack, with
which she herself begins.
50
OCTOBER
boundary between the feminine and the female, and slips from linguistic pun
into fixed bodily referent and back again, occupying the gray area between the literal
and the metaphoric that characterizes Hlne Cixouss writing with white ink
too.38 Asked about the consequences of her ideas for science and psychoanalytic
practice, Irigaray herself had something elusive to say about the problem:
And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily
on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the
privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is
much more closely allied to fluids). Orsuspending the status of truth
accorded to these essentially metalinguistic categories and dichotomous oppositionsto reply that in any event all language is (also)
metaphorical, and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the
subject of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection,
still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence
to solids.39
Wishing to defend against the charge of metaphoricity, Irigaray paradoxically uses
metaphorhere solids and fluidsto assert the primacy and subversive potential
of metonymy, while questioning the division between the two terms that she herself
uses (a division that she seems to suggest is too solid), emphasizing the
inescapable metaphoricity of language, form, and subjectivity, and returning to
the mainstream predominance of one of her two metaphors, in order to topple it
into the other.
This is reminiscent of the sliding of metaphor into metonymy of Modottis
photography, its inhabiting of the dim region between the optical and haptical,
form and touch, the iconic and the indexical (or to use Irigarays terms, between
the solidity of metaphoric figures and the fluidity of metonymic relations). It is
also evocative of what seems to be the irrevocable eliding of femininity into
femaleness, of culturally assigned attributes into biological sex that characterizes
definitions of the feminine and the female, in both patriarchal and feminist
discourse. One need look only to dictionary definitions to see this at work. For
female, the O.E.D. gives the following definitions:
Belonging to the sex which bears offspring. . . . Of the parts of a plant:
Fruit-bearing. . . . Of a blossom or flower: having a pistil and no stamens
. . . . Composed or consisting of women, or of female animals or
plants. . . . A distinctive term for that part of an instrument or contrivance
which is adapted to receive the corresponding or male part.
38.
See Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New
French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 24564: There is always within her a
little of that good mothers milk. She writes in white ink (p. 251).
39.
Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 10910, my emphasis.
51
For feminine, it gives the following:

Belonging to the female sex; female . . . of objects to which sex is attributed, or which have female names. . . . Or of pertaining to a woman, or
to women; consist ing of women; carr ied on by women. . . .
Characteristic of, peculiar or proper to women; womanlike or womanly
. . . . Depreciatively: Womanish, effeminate. . . . Of the gender to which
appellations of females belong. . . . The adjective used absolutedly: She
that is, or they that are, feminine. . . . The feminine element in human
nature. . . . A person, rarely an animal, that is feminine, a female, a
woman. . . . A word of the feminine gender. . . .
(To that, one may add all the variance in the qualities associated with femininity
and femaleness, which range from culture to nature, from the pretty in pink
assigned to girl babies and girls toys to the blue that used to be feminine, from
the diminutive to the devouring, from the soft and ladylike, the ethereal and the
unsexed, to the medusal, the animalistic, the unsublimated and sex itself.)
Revealing about the circularity of thought inscribed in the words we use for sex
and gender, these definitions are notable for their lability, their hovering between
the biological and the linguistic, corporeal inherence and evaluative adjective,
essence and supplement, with female weighted toward the former and feminine
toward the latter. But the feminine is particularly fluid, as slippery as metaphor
itself in its movement from the one into the other and back again.40
As for the femininity of Modottis field of vision, what I offer here is a
description, not an explanation, and it pertains to the optional, ascribed
femininity of one aesthetic in relation to the chosen, imputed masculinity of
another, rather more than the femaleness of one artist versus the maleness of the
otherthough Modottis discretionary femininity is not so clearly separable
from the perforce fact of her having been female, any more than Westons elective
masculinity is detachable from the unchosen fact of his having been male. Or any
more than the hapto-philia, the destructible, almost-tangible materiality and the
fragile gray zone of Modottis photographs are divisible from the pistillate, petiole,
child-bearing, and houseworking iconicity of the vegetal and corporeal referents to
which they are indexically bound. And just as it may be one of the fortunes of
feminism, sometimes even at its most deconstructivethink of Simone de
Beauvoirs natural-history eloquence on the subject of the sexual variety of the plant
and animal kingdoms, or Judith Butlers voyage deep into the heart of chromosomal difference41to never utterly sever culture from biology, or disentangle
gender from sex, so it is the contribution of Modottis photography which is not
one to insist on the blurring of the line between the metaphoric and the
40.
That slipperiness characterizes Freuds essay on Femininity, for instance.
41.
See Beauvoir, The Data of Biology, The Second Sex, pp. 337; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 106111.
52
OCTOBER
metonymic, the iconic and the indexical, optical figure and haptical blind field
ingrained in her medium, yet against its grain too. And thereby to question the
transcendence of the New Visions one of form: to propose, from a feminine point
of view, something else other and more regressive than modernisms monotheistic
monopoly of the self-definition of photography as an avant-garde optics.

This Photography Which Is Not One: in The Gray Zone With Tina Modotti

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This Photography Which Is Not One:

In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti

Prolegomena: Speaking from the Body

This Photography Which Is Not One

This Photography Which Is Not One

What interests me most about Modottis letters to Weston concerning

Weston. Nautilus Shell. 1927. 1981 Center for

This Photography Which Is Not One

Modotti. Roses. 1924. Courtesy

bouquet, gather ye rosebuds, a rose by any other name, a rose is a roseas to

This Photography Which Is Not One

falls accordingly. As a result, the flower is no more strongly distinguished from

Of the two, Calla Lilies is a more controlled, precise photograph, in that

Left: Modotti. Cloth Folds. c. 1924. 2002 The Museum of

This Photography Which Is Not One

This Photography Which Is Not One

Modotti. Interior of a Church.

This Photography Which Is Not One

Weston. Nude, 1935. 1981 Center for Creative

Some fifty years later a young American woman working in Rome,

Francesca Woodman. I.152/

Perhaps Woodmans photograph represents, within its frame, the conversion

Above: Modotti. Hands Washing. c. 1927. 2002 The Museum of

This Photography Which Is Not One

Weston. Hands, Mexico. 1924. Center for

This Photography Which Is Not One

the formalist photographs internal relation to itself, as in Hands, Mexico. And

Modotti. Baby Nursing. c. 1926-27. 2001

otherness; its triangulation of voyeuristic camera, narrative protagonist, and

At a moment prior to their theorization, none of these characteristics would

This Photography Which Is Not One

The same may be said of Modottis photography, on all counts. Indeed,

This Photography Which Is Not One

For feminine, it gives the following:

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