Tina Modotti 1896-1942

The photographer to Vittorio Vidali

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Acquired by the present collection from the above, 2000

20 Twenty (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 1999), pl. 13 (this print)

Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (New York, 1983), p. 112 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

German List Arzubide, El Movimento Estridentista (Mexico City, 1927), p. 54

transition, no. 15, November 1929, after p. 278

Sarah Lowe, Tina Modotti Photographs (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995), fig. 16

Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti, Photographer and Revolutionary (London and San Francisco, 1993), p. 126

Tina Modotti, The Mexican Renaissance (Paris, 2000, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm), p. 15

Valentina Agostinis, Tina Modotti: Gli anni Luminosi (Pordenone, 1992), p. 98

Luz y Tiempo (Mexico City: Fundacion Cultural Televisa, 1995), p. 351

It is believed that there are only two other vintage prints of this image extant. One of these, a gelatin silver print, is in the collection of the Fundacion Cultural Televisa, Mexico.  The other is in a private collection, also in Mexico. 

According to Modotti authority Sarah Lowe, Modotti’s Telegraph Wires was embraced by the artistic/political group, the Estridentistas.  Founded by Mexican artists and writers, among them Fermín Revueltas and Leopoldo Méndez, the group’s agenda was to modernize Mexico culturally.  In terms of its subject matter, Telegraph Wires served as an apt metaphor for the modernization of the country.  Aesthetically, the photograph’s lack of a horizon line places it firmly within the realm of Modernism.  The image was reproduced in German List Arzubide’s 1927 El Movimento Estridentista, where he referred to the poles at ‘electrical antlers.’  Lowe notes that Telegraph Wires was also published in ‘Eugene Jolas’s modernist journal, transition, alongside photographs by Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy' (Lowe, p. 26).