stant social ferment: lines of people awaiting the
distribution of foodstuffs in the midst of famine,
protests with banners that clamor for ‘‘WATER,
WATER, WATER,’’ and women demanding
‘‘Work for all.’’ However, photography (as glimpsed
through the Casasola Archive) continued largely to
corroborate the political interpretations of whatever
regime held power in Mexico City, and to whom the
advertising of opposition gains in the countryside
was anathema. There are interesting images: for
example, those made in 1913 of Francisco Madero’s
overthrow during the ‘‘Tragic Ten Days’’ could be
among the first combat photographs of the twentieth
century and the touching farewells between women
and soldiers in the train station are still evocative.
But, in general, the images of the revolution that
most dominate are of the different leaders who
passed through Mexico City.
After the armed struggle ended, the Casasolas
maintained the agency, and among their assign-
ments was the work Agustı ́nVı ́ctor did for the
Mexican government during the 1920s and 1930s
as the photographic coordinator of various state
offices. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in his
archive there are few images of post-Revolutionary
Mexico that focus on the continuing social inequal-
ities. However, though his prison photography was
made for the yellow sheets of tabloid journalism,
some images carry at least an implicit criticism of
class injustice: sad-eyed teenage prostitutes stare
back at the camera; men in bare feet and ragged
clothing stand in front of well-clad lawyers to be
judged; street urchins, their faces smeared with
filth, are corralled by police who seem to take little
joy in their task; officers taunt transvestites who
appeal to the camera with their eyes.
Edward Weston and Tina Modotti came to Mex-
ico City in 1923, and their presence was to have an
important influence on Mexican photography.
Integrating themselves into the cultural efferves-
cence, they entered into the world of the muralists
and other artists. Weston was already famous when
he arrived in Mexico, but it was here that he
effected the break with Pictorialism that would
define twentieth-century photography throughout
the world. Eschewing the soft-focus that attempted
to imitate painting, he insisted that he was uninter-
ested in the question of whether photography was
art or not; his concern was whether a given image
was a good photograph. He was wary of the intrin-
sic picturesqueness of Mexico and battled to avoid
it. One result of his search to define the new med-
ium can be seen in his 1925 images of a toilet, which
served to demonstrate photography’s power for
reproducing the beauty of the mundane.
Tina Modotti was known as his apprentice, and
she followed his example of hard-focus photogra-
phy that revealed things in themselves. However,
her commitment to social justice led her to fill Wes-
ton’s form with a radically different content, per-
haps inaugurating critical photography in Latin
America. What are probably the first examples of
published photographs which questioned the new
Mexican order can be found in a handful of her
images that appeared during the 1920s in the news-
paper of the Mexican Communist party,El Ma-
chete. There, depictions of social inequities were
accompanied by cutlines pointing out the contra-
dictions between the promises of the Revolutionary
regime and the reality of most people’s lives. For
example, one image of a little girl carrying water
was ironically titled ‘‘The Protection of Children,’’
and the cutline stated: ‘‘There are millions of girls
like this in Mexico. They labor strenuously for 12 to
15 hours a day, almost always just for food...and
what food! Nevertheless, the Constitution....’’
Modotti’s photos were an appropriate counter-
part to the lithographs that were placed onEl
Machete’s pages by its founders, the muralists
Jose ́ Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros,
and Diego Rivera, and they were a welcome change
from the fuzzy images of Soviet leaders that had
been the paper’s photographic staple. Accustomed
to carefully planning her images, she did not feel
comfortable photographing in the street. She had
no qualms, however, about creating a photomon-
tage such asThose on top and those on the bottom
(1928) to make her point. In the lower half of this
photo, a poor man in rags sits on the curb of a city
street forlornly holding his head in his hand. In the
upper half, a billboard looms with an advertise-
ment from a fashionable men’s store: a painting
of a monocled, light-skinned man in a tuxedo is
helped into his overcoat by his mestizo butler, and
the pitch for Estrada Brothers clothiers claims that
they ‘‘Have everything a gentleman needs to dress
elegantly from head to toe.’’
The real battle between those who wanted to
represent Mexico through picturesque modes and
those who resisted the appeal of the exotic began in
the 1920s as part of the search for national identity
provoked by the Mexican Revolution. Ironically,
the controversy is most easily embodied—at least
initially—in the positions adopted by foreigners: on
one side, that of Weston and Modotti, who rejected
such stereotyping; on the other, that of Hugo
Brehme. A German who arrived in Mexico in
1908 (he died there in 1954), Brehme was the lead-
ing light of the magazineHelios, published by the
Association of Mexican Photographers, and hisMEXICO, PHOTOGRAPHY IN