Tina Modotti famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I don't believe in marriage. I think at worst it's a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it's a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they're about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don't think it's conservative or delusional. I think it's radical and courageous and very romantic.
-- Tina Modotti

#Religious #Believe #Eye
I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.
-- Tina Modotti

#Art #Losing #Problem
Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.
-- Tina Modotti

#Photography #Believe #Should Have
Always, when the words art and artistic are applied to my photographic work, I am disagreeably affected. This is due, surely, to the bad use and abuse made of those terms. I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations.
-- Tina Modotti

#Art #Abuse #Trying
To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.
-- Tina Modotti

#Photography #Appreciation #Art
I know that the materials found on the streets is rich and wonderful, but my experience is that the way I am accustomed to work, slowly planning my composition etc. is not suited for such work. By the time I have the composition or expression right, the picture is gone. I guess I want to do the impossible and therefore I do nothing.
-- Tina Modotti

#Expression #Gone #Want
I cannot, as you [Edward Weston] once proposed to me - solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art ... in my case, life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers.
-- Tina Modotti

#Art #Struggle #Suffering
... I just feel impotent - I don't know which way to start or turn. You know what they say about a prophet in one's own country - well - in a way it works for me too: you see - this might be called my home town - well of all the old friends and acquaintances not one takes me seriously as a photographer - not one has asked me to show my work... (On returning to San Francisco)
-- Tina Modotti

#Country #Home #San Francisco

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
Government...may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another... The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality...
The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.
Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.
Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.
Rather than making money I believe in making people happy, all other things are secondary. Money isn't important, creative satisfaction is
The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby's boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below. If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn't run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.

Tina Modotti famous quotes

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