Nahui Olín

Edward Weston

1923 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

This portrait of Nahui Olín belongs to a series of photographs that Weston referred to as "heroic heads." Sitters were chosen from among the circle of intellectual friends with whom he and his companion, Tina Modotti, associated during his years in Mexico. Here, the sitter is Carmen Mondragón (1896-1978), a Mexican poet and painter who grew up in Paris and who, upon her return to Mexico, took an Indian name meaning "four movements of the sun." Nahui Olín posed for Weston in November 1923, and the portrait was exhibited in his second show at the Aztec Land Gallery in Mexico City the following year. In his "Daybooks," Weston recorded that Nahui Olín was annoyed by the revealing nature of the portrait; he himself considered it, together with others from the same sitting, to be among the best pictures he had made in Mexico. It proved to be one of the most popular images in the exhibition and probably inspired these lines in a prose poem review by Francisco Monterde García Icazbalceta: ". . . cruelly, [Weston] prefers to guillotine heads in the noon sun: unreal necks and martyred eyes in harsh, insolent light." Flattering or not (and flattery would not have been Weston's concern), the image is a powerful expression of the photographer's piercing eye, a confrontational face-off between two equally strong personalities.

Artist

Edward Weston

Date

1923

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005