Tina Modotti (1896–1942) - Hands of the Puppeteer Louis Bunin, Mexico City, 1929

Hands of the Puppeteer Louis Bunin, Mexico City, 1929
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper, 30x24 cm, Galerie Bilderwelt, portfolio edition of 5.
Print used in the exhibition, catalog & portfolio "TINA MODOTTI -Photographien & Dokumente" Berlin 1989, the first exhibition of Modottis work in Germany.
It was organized in cooperation with Fototeca del Inah, Pachuca, Mexico, the repository of the surviving Modotti negatives transferred from Trieste to Mexico in the 1970s by Carlos Vidali, son of Vittorio Vidali, the last companion of Tina Modotti.

This image was also shown in the exhibition TINA MODOTTI produced by Galerie Bilderwelt for the Museo Cerralbo as part of XXV edition of PHotoESPAÑA in 2022.It is documented in the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrKmxgnf3pI
Other exhibitions include:
Parma 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwxiaP_s494


Italian-born Tina Modotti (1896-1942), a committed Communist and ground-breaking photographer, took images of working people in Mexico in the 1920s and 30s in a refreshingly non-documentary and aesthetic manner. Hands were a particular preoccupation of hers. Hands of a Puppeteer (1929), whose subject comes from a popular form of Mexican entertainment, is an intriguing, artful composition that blends formal elements and political concerns. Modotti’s skill as an artist is revealed in, say, the dramatic contrasts of shadow and light, the criss-crossing diagonals of the arms/hands and wooden puppetry bars, and the textural detail of the strings draped across hands or the man’s arm-hair and veins.
But as a politically engaged artist, Modotti would have been aware of how the idea of puppetry could be a social and political metaphor – the hands symbolising those in power, pulling the strings of the powerless. At the time there was growing disillusionment in Mexico concerning reform or emancipation for ethnic groups and the working-classes. Hands of a Puppeteer (1929) hints at this political message in a non-didactic way while offering an original, striking image.