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FRIDA KAHLO: The Camera and the ImageThe Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo was born in 1907. This date did not appeal to her however, so she decided on another one. She chose instead 1910, the year that marks the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and of a decades-long process by which the country reinvented itself in its search for a new identity. As Frida’s life traversed these tumultuous years it paralleled this process as she reinvented herself again and again. In today’s era of fragmenting identities, it is the ease with which Frida took on these new guises that account for a large part of her appeal to millions and to the creation of the icon she has become. Crucial to the invention of this icon, an extraordinary work of art it itself, was Frida’s manipulation and understanding of the camera. The photographs in this collection articulate the development of her iconic image and bring into focus its kaleidoscopic dimensions.
Photography was pervasive in Frida’s life, particularly in her formative years. She was born into a family of two generations of photographers. Her paternal grandfather, Jakob Heinrich Kahlo, a Hungarian Jew, dealt in photographic supplies while her maternal grandfather, Antonio Calderón, a Mexican of indigenous descent, was a successful, professional photographer with a studio in the city of Oaxaca. It was Calderón who propelled Frida’s father, Wilhem (Guillermo) Kahlo, into a career as a photographer by lending him a camera and taking him on a photographic trip through Mexico. When they returned, Kahlo had made enough photographs to be able to open his own studio in the elegant La Perla building in downtown Mexico City. Born in Baden-Baden, Germany, Guillermo Kahlo arrived in Mexico in 1891 when he was nineteen. During the first decade of the twentieth century he was a very successful photographer, primarily as a result of the commissions he received from the government of the dictator Porfirio Díaz to record architectural monuments for a series of photographic albums to be published in celebration of the centenary of Mexico’s independence in 1910. For many years, he was considered the major photographer of Mexico’s architectural heritage and was referred to as the “first official photographer” of the nation’s cultural patrimony. Kahlo did not only make photographs of monuments, however; he was also an accomplished, though somewhat reluctant, portrait photographer. His preferred subjects were members of his own family, and he made numerous formal portraits of them. From an early age Frida became familiar with the camera, and at ease in front of it, as photographs of her while she was still a toddler indicate. In fact, her father really wanted her to follow in his footsteps and become a photographer. By the time she was an adolescent, Frida was not only very accomplished at posing for the camera in order to project the image she desired, but knew how to operate it as well. She often accompanied her father, who suffered from epileptic seizures, on his photographic assignments around Mexico City, primarily to protect him and his weighty German-made cameras when he collapsed. Being present as he composed his images would provide her with important instruction in composition, of which he was a master, as well as other photographic skills. She also spent time at his studio helping him with the tedious tasks of retouching and hand-tinting his portrait photographs, skills that required a proficiency in making extremely tiny brushstrokes. On various occasions, she also assisted him with the printing and developing of photographs. Photographs as objects were of great importance to Frida as she became older. She hung them on the walls of her home, pinned them on the headboard of her bed and for many years she displayed several daguerreotype images on a table in her studio, some of which were made by her father who had been a daguerreotypist early in his career. As with her self-portrait paintings, she frequently made gifts of photographs of herself to friends, often adding colourful inscriptions and drawings. Frida was also fascinated by Mexico’s itinerant street photographers who traveled from plaza to plaza setting up their wares, with their imaginative backdrops and props ranging from wooden horses to cardboard airplanes. During their marriage, she and Diego Rivera posed for these photographers on several occasions; in one image Frida is dressed in full Mexican regalia against a backdrop of an Alpine village complete with a locomotive chugging through it. Frida’s father was not the only important photographer in her life, however. In her mid-twenties, just after she married Diego, she began an affair that lasted intermittently for almost a decade with the photographer Nicolas Muray. Several of her close friends were also photographers, among them Lola Álvarez Bravo and Bernice Kolko, and over the years she formed close relationships with many of the photojournalists who came to photograph her on magazine assignments. The list of photographers she sat for, several of whom were part of her circle, reads like a who’s who of twentieth-century photography. They include Tina Modotti, Dora Maar, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Martin Munkansci, Carl Van Vechten, and Gisèle Freund. Nevertheless, it was her father’s influence during her formative years, more than any other, that contributed to creating the icon Frida Kahlo would become. Guillermo Kahlo adored his fifth child and considered her the most intelligent of his daughters and hence, the one most like him! He treated her like the son he had never had, and in addition to exposing her to photography and painting, he stimulated her natural curiosity by encouraging her to read widely and supplying her with titles from his library. He also taught her to view through his microscope the nature specimens they collected on their long walks together and introduced her to pre-Columbian art, which he loved. Kahlo himself was an enthusiastic amateur painter and kept an easel in his photography studio. He tended to paint watercolours, usually bucolic scenes copied from illustrations or painstakingly realistic depictions of flowers and fruit. It was as if he imbued his paintings with all the sentimentality and romanticism his photographs lacked. Apart from some examples of his portrait photography, Kahlo’s photographs, while beautifully composed with extraordinary angles, are cold, almost scientific renderings of buildings devoid of people. While her father’s painting no doubt captivated Frida as a child and provided her with some important instruction, it was primarily his portrait photography that was to inform her work. Frida was secure in her father’s love and there is no doubt that she identified with him as a child. Part of this identification was probably that they both suffered from illnesses; his epilepsy and the polio she contracted as a child. In the painting of her family tree, My Grandparents, My Parents and I, 1936, she places herself and her home, the Casa Azul, directly in front of her father. In the painting her mother is relegated to his side, the mere bearer of babies, Frida has depicted her accompanied by the fertilised egg and shows her womb with the fetus. Although Frida knew her father adored her, he was, she said, “a kind of fearful mystery” for whom she also felt pity. As a child, in a gesture of mock formality, she addressed the rather taciturn and formal German as Herr Kahlo. Many years later, in her diary, she described him as, “an immense example of tenderness and work, as both a photographer and a painter”, who most importantly, understood “all” her problems. In 1925, Frida was riding in a bus that collided with a tram and suffered injuries that caused her to be in pain for much of the rest of her life. Following this accident, her father was instrumental in helping her recapture her indomitable spirit. That same year, he gave all of his children a portrait of himself inscribed with the words "Every now and then remember the affection your father has always had for you”. His peculiarly forceful gaze in this photograph is reminiscent of the intensity of Frida’s own forthright gaze in her self-portraits. It was during her long, slow recovery that Frida first began to paint self-portraits, the genre she preferred for the rest of her career. It was her mother who had conceived the idea of rigging up the apparatus that allowed her to paint while bedridden, but her choice of self-portraiture was a mixture of expediency and her father’s influence. The first self-portrait Frida completed was Self-Portrait, 1926 and when she had finished it she mimicked her father’s earlier gesture by choosing to give the painting to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, as a token of her love and in the hope that he would not forget her. Most of Frida’s self-portraits were painted using the mirror, and her model became her reflected image, facilitating a substitution of symbolic space for her actual environment. Frida filled this space, in her self-portraits as well as in several of her other works, with the accoutrements of portrait photography, such as props, costumes and backcloths. Frequently her subject appears to float in front of a space rather than within it, with the background reminiscent of a photographer’s backdrop. An example that could be interpreted as including all three of these elements -props, costumes and backdrop - is Self-Portrait on the border-line between Mexico and the United States, 1932. Here a full-length figure of Frida in a Victorian-style dress and lace gloves holding a Mexican flag poses in front of “landscape” of emblematic images of the United States and Mexico, not unlike the Alpine symbols in the above-mentioned photograph of her and Diego against a photographer’s backdrop. A self-portrait that illustrates the same concept is Self-Portrait as Tehuana, 1943, and Self-Portrait, 1948, where it appears as if Frida has pushed her head through an opening in a backcloth with a Tehuana headdress painted on it. Frida liked to use identifying objects in her paintings similar to those used by portrait photographers, particularly in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs where sitters posed with objects that reflect their occupations, special interests or achievements. In Luther Burbank, 1931, she portrays the great Californian horticulturist holding an enormous plant and in Doña Rosita Morillo, 1944, the grandmotherly Doña Rosita is depicted with her knitting. She also sometimes painted from photographs, her portrait of her father and mother in My Grand-Parents, My Parents and I, 1936, is based on their wedding photograph. The depictions of other family members were most likely painted from old family photographs as well. In addition, in The Two Fridas, c. 1945 the painting of Diego on the medallion held by one of the Fridas is also made from a photograph. Clearly, Guillermo Kahlo’s somewhat rigid studio portraits impacted upon much of Frida’s portraiture. An instance of such influence is reflected in the manner in which her subjects often appear immobilized as if they are holding a pose for a camera, as in her painting Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931, a charming portrait of the two artists which has a daguerreotype-like quality. In addition, her preference for painting with tiny, light brush strokes was probably a result of mastering the technique she learned while retouching his photographs. However, her innovative use of photographic elements in her painting My Dress hangs There, 1933, appears to be all her own. This work is somewhat similar to Self-Portrait on the border-line between Mexico and the United States, 1932, in that it is another depiction of her love of Mexico and dislike of life in the United States. This time Mexico is not represented except by Frida’s Tehuana dress hanging empty on a clothesline and the artist’s focus is a caustic look at the city of New York; the city that was actually Frida’s preferred place in the US. She and Diego spent several years during the 1930s in America where Rivera had commissions to paint murals. In 1933 they were in New York while he painted a mural commissioned by the Rockefeller family. Of most interest in this work is the incorporation of more than twenty fragments of black and white photographs taken from magazines and newspapers that Frida has glued to the painting. The juxtaposition of the black and white elements with the areas of colour is a forerunner of mixed-media works that contemporary artists have made familiar, according to Mexican art historian Olivier Debroise, who believes that Frida’s use of photography in this manner was unique in the history of painting at the time. Four years later, during a sitting with Frida at his Mexico City studio, the eminent photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo referenced this painting in a fascinating portrait of her, Frida Kahlo and dress on clothesline, 1938. He photographed Frida who has returned to her beloved Mexico, wearing her Tehuana clothing beside a clothesline on which an empty Western-style dress hangs. It creates a counter-image to the Tehuana dress in the painting and is figuratively the view from Mexico - the view from the other side. The painting of Frida’s most clearly based upon a photograph is Portrait of My Father Wilhem Kahlo, 1951. For the painting, Frida utilized the photograph of himself her father had given her in 1925. This photograph was pinned to the headboard of her bed for years and was still there when she died. Her portrait of her father is a gesture of love, and, almost a decade after his death, a response to his request inscribed in the bottom panel of the photograph that she should not forget him and his affection for her. Replicating his inscription panel, Frida has written along the bottom of the portrait: "I painted my father, Wilhelm Kahlo of Hungarian-German origin, artist-photographer by profession, in character generous, intelligent and fine, valiant because he suffered for sixty years with epilepsy, but never stopped working and fought against Hitler, in adoration, His daughter Frida Kahlo”. In the painting, whose brown tones suggest the sepia tones of her father’s self-portrait, Frida has painted a younger, more handsome Kahlo than the one in the photograph. In it she has given almost equal prominence to her father’s large box camera as to his face and has painted his eyes large and glassy, mirroring the "eye" or lens of the camera beside him. Both the lens and her father’s eyes face in the same direction and the background of the painting swarms with what appear to be magnified spermatozoids and egg-like spheres that echo her father’s eyes which she has painted overly-round. The association of the camera lens with her father’s eyes, or gaze, and the egg-like symbols of fertility are interesting in the context of how Frida presented herself to the camera from the outset. From an early age, photographic portraits of her have an enigmatic, seductive quality as she openly flirted with the lens and by extrapolation, her father. Even in her father’s portrait of her, Frida at four years old, 1911, we can see a glimmer of this quality in the slight half-smile she was to frequently use for the camera in decades to come. It is a precursor of the many elements that Frida would bring together to enable her to create the image she wished to project at a particular point in time; images that a familiarity and fascination with photography facilitated. Even as a child, clothes were a kind of personal language for Frida and essential to the construction of her many personas. Throughout her life she used an extraordinary variety of outfits as if going through a never-ending trunk of a portrait photographer’s props and costumes, starting with the denim overalls she wore as a child (then almost unheard of attire for a middle-class little girl), as well as boots, floppy ties and caps, men’s suits, period dresses in velvets and silks, blue jeans and regional costumes from every area of Mexico. Her first persona seems to have been created at the age of fourteen when she enrolled in the prepa, the National Preparatory School, where she was one of only thirty-five girls among two thousand students. Frida soon became a member of a group of brilliant but irreverent students known as the Cachuchas after the large, peaked caps they all wore. They were a youthful band of merry pranksters who enjoyed being outrageous, and prided themselves in their punning and caustic witticisms, a sense of humour that Frida shared and employed from then on in her correspondence and conversation. The accident four years later and the months of convalescence that followed during which she was confined to her home, put an end to Frida’s Cachucha identity. She emerged from this period a serious young woman in search of a religious and sexual identity. She had already had her first homosexual experience, apparently with a teacher at the school, was reading extensively on Judaism and Christianity and had undergone confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church. Her clothing tended towards somber dresses with a Renaissance touch made of luxurious materials, while her props were large crosses and books in Gothic script. Suddenly, however, she makes a startling appearance in a family portrait dressed in an elegant man’s three-piece suit with shirt and tie. When she had recovered and was back in circulation again, Frida became more interested in revolutionary politics than religion and joined the Mexican Communist Party’s youth league. Modest linen skirts with martial-like blouses, leather jackets and pants became new items in her wardrobe integral to her new image as a militant in the ranks of the proletariat. This is how she appears in a Tina Modotti photograph of her and her fellow artists marching in a May Day demonstration in 1929. But it was not until her marriage to Diego later that year that Frida was to develop the image that would be integral to the legend she has now become. As she described it in an interview cited in the newspaper Excélsior, "In another period I dressed like a boy with shaved hair, pants, boots, and a leather jacket. But when I went to see Diego I put on a Tehuana costume. I’ve never been to Tehuantepec … nor do I have any connection to the town, but of all Mexican costumes this is the one I like best and that’s why I wear it." Diego had first visited the Tehuantepec Isthmus a decade previously and enthused about the rich cultural heritage he found there. He was particularly enamoured of the strong stately women of the region and their magnificent indigenous costume. When he returned to Mexico City he included depictions of them in his murals, which probably inspired Frida her to adopt their clothing as her own. By espousing the Tehuana costume Frida not only found a new self-image but created a new identity. From then on Mexican indigenous costume became symbolic of her mestizo roots of mixed Indian and European blood, and a new, wholly Mexican Frida was born, one who not only rejected things European but also glorified Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. There were also political reasons for wearing such clothing, as it immediately identified one with the Mexican revolution and its goals of dignity and land for Mexico’s indigenous peoples. It also helped that the Tehuana costume with its flowing skirts and midriff-length blouses in vibrant colours and variety of patterns, materials and embroideries is one of the world’s most beautiful. In Frida’s case, indigenous clothing allowed her to conceal the signs of polio and other problems with her legs and feet that resulted from her accident, and was a perfect foil to her ugly “frog prince” Diego who, despite his love of the folkloric, never wore indigenous costume. For Frida, clothes were a means of communication with the outside world and every day she selected from her lexicon the elements that would best represent the image she wanted to project. Some of those who had the privilege of watching her dress describe it as being present at a cross between a ceremonial ritual and the creation of a work of art, particularly if she was preparing to receive a photographer arriving for a session. Frida selected from a wardrobe of an enormous array of clothes from all over the Mexican republic. Choosing combinations from a vast assortment of skirts, blouses and belts, dresses, shawls and petticoats, all in a wide variety of colours and textures, plus footwear that ranged from pointed-toed cowboy boots, to huarache sandals and even, her one concession to western style, four-inch high-heeled pumps. She sometimes took hours over the process carefully choosing and combining items of clothing after making sure that each item was in perfect condition. She thought nothing of making adjustments on the spot with a needle and thread or having one of her servants re-press an item that had the slightest rumpled pleat. If in any doubt about the final overall effect, she would ask the opinion of those she trusted as to whether it looked good, and start all over again if it did not. Then she would choose from the jewelry which she adored and was lavished on her by Diego. Pre-Colombian necklaces of huge jade beads, long gold chains that could amount to the dowry of an Aztec princess, a string of simple beads she had found on a market stall and enormous rings that she wore on every finger. Make-up was also integral to Frida's creation and it was copiously but skillfully employed right down to her fingernail polish which could be green, purple or fire engine red depending on what she was wearing. But the most spectacular part of Frida's dressing process was the arranging of her long, dark hair which she also wore in the styles of different Indigenous regions of Mexico. This was such a sensual and seductive ritual that some of her lovers and intimate friends liked to be present when she was carrying it out. On one of her visits to the United States, gallery owner Julien Levy made a remarkable series of photographs of Frida dressing her hair while naked. After brushing it vigorously until it gleamed, she usually swept it upward and braided it. Then she would choose between extending the braids with thick coloured wool piled on top of her head in the manner of the women of the Otomí region, weaving ribbons into it and affixing it with tortoiseshell combs or decorating it with fresh flowers. She seemed to derive a perverse pleasure from painfully pulling and twisting her hair tightly, digging combs into her scalp, sticking in hairpins and tying ribbons and bows until she achieved the dramatic outcome. When she finally emerged from this theatrical process Frida had created a work of art. If she had done so for a photographic session, the photographers could choose from an assortment of props and backdrops. For many the latter was the Casa Azul, itself another of Frida's creations, replete with Mexican iconography. Others chose her pets or her paintings, beside which she would pose with palette and brush in hand. Towards the end of her life Frida tried her utmost to conceal her pain and physical deterioration by distracting from her condition with increasingly flamboyant costumes, heavier make-up and more lavish hairstyles. With a few exceptions she still managed to maintain this elaborate packaging in front of the lens. In some of these photographs her vivacious personality is concealed beneath a tight mask but her eyes seek out the viewer with a gaze that continues to challenge and captivate. Frida loved the camera, particularly when it produced what she wanted. She usually made sure it did just that in photographs of herself, which is why throughout her life she distributed so many of these portraits among her friends and loved ones. It was her way of ensuring a vital presence in their lives, a way of saying, "Here I am, do not forget me". Copyright © 2002 Margaret Hooks |
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