Women of Tehuantepec is the name later curators and scholars gave to the photographs Tina Modotti made in 1929 in Tehuantepec and Juchitán, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca. Modotti did not title the group herself. Across more than twenty photographs she recorded Zapotec Tehuana women going about their day: carrying goods on their heads, holding and bathing children, washing clothes, and walking through the streets and to market. The only men she photographed on the trip appear in the crowd at a festival in Juchitán.
Writing to Edward Weston in September 1929, she called the pictures snapshots, made hurriedly in the street, many of them "messy or moved," because the women walked faster as soon as they saw her camera. In her essay On Photography, published later that year, she wrote that she tried to produce "not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations," and stressed photography's value as a record of present life.
The group combines two kinds of picture. Most are quick, unposed street photographs, some blurred. A few are composed portraits, such as Woman of Tehuantepec, in which the sitter is seen from below and set close to the edge of the frame. The vintage prints are mostly small gelatin-silver contact prints. Modotti sent some to Weston and others, captioned in her hand, to the family of her late husband.
Woman of Tehuantepec illustrated On Photography in Mexican Folkways in late 1929, and photographs from the trip have been included in her solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional that December. Individual photographs have since appeared in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 1995 retrospective, which traveled to Houston and San Francisco, at ROSPHOTO in 2019, in the Whitney Museum's Vida Americana in 2020, and in MoMA's 2022–23 gallery on indigenism and the Latin American avant-garde. Prints are held by MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
