Tina Modotti on the Riverbank

Found somone's dissertation on Tina Modotti frozen into the mud on the riverbank, open to this page.

A photograph: printed, forgotten, discovered, printed again and studied, forgotten again, multiplied across pages and digital images, and a book is printed and forgotten and loses its original purpose.

 

At moments of danger, Benjamin argues, earlier generations alert us to the mistake that we are on the verge of making through an image that bursts out of the continuum of time and travels toward us. 

Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, page 12.

A picture flying through time and through different contexts, but never losing its essential being, greets me, startlingly, as I bike through a big ice puddle near the river bank.

 

Where the painting remained in the possession of a particular family, now and then someone would ask about the person portrayed. But after two or three generations this interest fades; the pictures, if they last, do so only as testimony to the art of the painter. With photography, however, we encounter something new and strange [...] something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in " art. "

Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography, page 510.

They do so because we are in a position to "change the character" of their "day." If we recognize the present in this image from the past, and also understand that it is "intended" for us, we will redeem both the past and the present. At the moment in which this redemption occurs, which Benjamin calls "Jetztzeit" or "now-time," "what is" because co-present with "what was."

Silverman, continued from quote above.

--