Pablo Ortíz Monasterio - Frida Kahlo: Her Photos

her photos

her photos

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
Edition and Page Layout

E DITORIAL RM

Contents

Presentation

Carlos Phillips

The Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust Fund, as well as its Technical Committee, are honored to present the book Frida Kahlo, Her Photographs, which includes over 500 pictures from the Frida Kahlo Museum Archive. Pablo Ortiz Monasterioa photographer, editor, curator, and eager promoter of photography in Mexicowas in charge of this selection.

Upon making his donation through the Trust Fund, the great artist Diego Rivera asked Ms. Dolores Olmedo to store the archive and only make it public fifteen years after his death. Ms. Olmedo kept the archive for over fifty years, and so, after her passing, the Trust Fund Technical Committee decided to open it, catalog it, and make it public. Both the recovery and the classification of materials were possible due to the generosity of ADABI (Department for the Development of Archives and Libraries in Mexico), an institution chaired by Mara Isabel Gran Porra and Mr. Alfredo Harp Hel.

This is an important and original archive that will certainly allow us to delve into the life and works of Frida Kahlo. Out of the vast range of works discovered, the selection here presented constitutes a true expedition into Fridas intimate family life and also provides a good chance to know the artists world through pictures taken by her father, other photographers, and Frida herself.

This book, published as a co-edition and generously supported by Ramn and Javier Revert, chairs of Editorial RM, features seven different sections into which the photographic works have been divided: The Origins, Father, The Casa Azul, Broken Body, Love, Photography, and Political Struggle, which are accompanied by essays written by Masayo Nonaka, Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle, Laura Gonzlez Flores, Mauricio Ortiz, Gerardo Estrada, James Oles, and Horacio Fernndez. These personalities are experts from different countriesGermany, Spain, the United States, Japan, and Mexicowho present to us their views on the materials gathered in this publication.

It is so, then, that the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust Fund materializes Diego Riveras willto preserve the artistic treasures donated to the people of Mexico and to render them accessible for a better understanding of the works by these great artists.

F RIDA K AHLO, H ER P HOTOGRAPHS

Hilda Trujillo Soto

The Frida Kahlo Museum

Photography was a key influence on Frida Kahlos work. This was because of the early contact she had with visual images due to her fathers occupation, and later on, because of her close relationship with photographic artists whom she befriended, like Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Nickolas Muray, Martin Munkcsi, Manuel lvarez Bravo, Lola lvarez Bravo, Fritz Henle, and Gisle Freund, among others.

Thoroughly and lovingly, Frida amassed a vast photographic collection. In it, we can find photographs that must have belonged to either her family or Diego Rivera. However, it was she who took the trouble to keep them. The artist was undoubtedly fond of these beloved objectsshe would alter them by adding colors and lipstick kisses, by mutilating them or by writing her thoughts on them. She cherished them as substitutes for the people she loved and admired, or as images portraying history, art, and nature.

Through the means of photography, devised in the 19th century, Frida knew and used the artistic power of images. Either in front or behind the camera, Frida Kahlo developed a strong, well-defined personality, which she managed to project by means of an ideal languagephotography. Her relationship with Nickolas Muray, an outstanding fashion photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair or Harpers Bazaar, illustrates the way Frida established a natural connection with the lens. Many of Fridas finest and best known pictures were taken by the Hungarian-born American photographer. However, the photographs that Muray took while Frida was in the hospital, painstakingly painting her pictures, also stand out for their crudeness. These images greatly contrast with those in which we can see her before her surgeries, flirty and challenging, as she naturally was. Despite the excruciating pain that tormented her, Frida never lost her fascination for the camera, a device she always thought of as an instrument for portraying her vitality and strength.

Thanks to Fridas photographic collection, we can now state that her fathers fascination for self-portraits was a fundamental influence on both, the artists work and the way she always posed for the camera. Even in the childhood portraits taken by her father we can sense Fridas astonishing talent for exploiting her best angles and poses.

A piercing frontal stare, always focused on the objective, was the look Frida would always sport, both in her paintings and in the pictures taken by the greatest photographers of the 20th centuryImogen Cunningham, Bernard Silberstein, Lucienne Bloch, Lola lvarez Bravo, Gisle Freund, Fritz Henle, Leo Matiz, Guillermo Zamora, and Hctor Garca, among others. Many of these images were published at the request of Claudia Madrazo in the book