Tina Modotti

1920's Silver Gelatin Print By Tina Modotti of Diego Rivera Fresco.

1920's

An original 1920s silver gelatin print by photographer Tina Modotti, showing a fresco in the Agricultural School-Chapingo, Mexico by artist Diego Rivera. Photo is stamped “Photographs-Tina Modotti Mexico, D.F.” on reverse. Photograph size: 6 7/8" x 9 5/8". Archivally matted to 16” x 20” Tina Modotti was born in Udine, Italy in 1896 and by the age of 14 she was supporting her entire family by working in a local silk factory. Modotti’s father emigrated to San Francisco, sending for his family in 1913. Modotti was hired in the sewing room at the I. Magnin department store, but her great beauty attracted the attention of her superiors who then employed her to model the store’s fashions. In 1915, Modotti attended San Francisco’s Pan-Pacific Exposition, where she got her first look at Modern art and photography. She also met her first husband at the Exposition, painter and poet Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey. At this time Modotti began acting in local Italian theatre and was discovered by a talent scout for the new silent film industry in Hollywood. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1918 and was cast in “The Tiger’s Coat” and “I Can Explain”. Through her Hollywood connections, Modotti met the married photographer Edward Weston, with whom she began an affair. Modotti was a favorite subject of Weston’s photographs, but moreover he taught her the art of photography. She actually ran Weston’s studio in exchange for photography lessons. Due to the on-going affair between Modotti and Weston, Modotti’s husband moved to Mexico where he died of smallpox. This tragedy and the death of her father made Modotti dissatisfied with Hollywood. Modotti and Weston arrived in Mexico in 1923 at a time when the country was in the midst of a social, political and cultural revolution. She photographed the Mexican...

An original 1920s silver gelatin print by photographer Tina Modotti, showing a detail of an image of St. Francis in a fresco in a prep school in Mexico City by Clemente Orozco. Ph...

This artwork titled "Che (Che Guevara cutting cane) 1962 (printed later) is a gelatin silver print by noted Cuban artist Ernesto Fernandez Nogueras, b.1939. It is signed, titled and dated at the lower margin. The photograph size is 10 x 6.5 inches, framed size is 17.85 x 15.85 inches. Custom framed in a black frame, with white matting. It is in excellent condition. About the artist: Ernesto Fernandez trained under the tutelage of several established photographers during the 1950s in Havana. He is one of the four great photographers of the Revolutionary period of Cuba. As a young man he witnessed both the excesses of Havana as a “playground” of the USA, and the poverty that produced the hotbed of revolutionary thought and action. He was in the Cuban capital as the revolution reached its climax, and his pictures document a time of great hope. They are celebrations of youth’s ability to bring about change and to reinvent a new world. Alongside Korda, Salas and Corrales, Fernandez documented the heady days of the Triumph of the Revolution and continued to photograph Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other leading lights of the new system, including some wonderfully intimate studies of Alicia Alonso...

"Sidewalk Club of the Motherlode" a Lithobrome photograh by Sigismund Blumann (American, 1872-1956). Signed "Sigismund Blumann" lower right. Titled "Sidewalk Club of the Motherlode" on verso. Image size, 11.25"H x 13.25"W. Between 1923 and 1932, his pictures were accepted at photographic salons in Amsterdam, Toronto, Rochester, Seattle, and Los Angeles. In 1927, a one-person exhibition of his bromoil prints traveled to camera clubs in Chicago, Akron, Cincinnati, and New York. In addition to bromoil, a process that yields pointillistic images, Blumann utilized such unusual processes as kallitype (Vandyke brown), lithobrome, and pastelograph (the latter two probably his own inventions) to create original photographs using chemical processes he invented. Sigismund Blumann (1872–1956) (figure 1) was a prominent tastemaker in Californian photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area for his entire career, he edited magazines, wrote books, and made creative photographs. From 1924 to 1933 Blumann edited Camera Craft, the leading West Coast photographic monthly. Subsequently he established his own periodical, Photo Art Monthly, which he published until 1940. In these two magazines — for over fifteen years — Blumann found a large audience of mainstream pictorial photographers. In addition, he wrote five instructional books on photography...