Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico considers several photographers who traveled to Mexico from the United States in the 1920s through 1940s. Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Helen Levitt are the protagonists of the book’s four chapters, which foreground how these visits (of varying lengths of time) and contact with colleagues there (of varying degrees of engagement) intervened on the artists’ formal and professional trajectories. Several Mexico-based artists and cultural agents appear as direct and indirect interlocutors, including Diego Rivera, José Vasconcelos, Carlos Chávez, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. All but Modotti returned to the United States. And all were enshrined (eventually) in canons of modernist photographic history narrated from both sides of the border.
The photographers arrived in Mexico in the wake of a revolution and in the midst of a state-sponsored reconstruction project in which Indigenous and folk cultures were appropriated by mestizo elites and promoted...
University of California Press