KATI HORNA

A photojournalist, war photographer, artist, anarchist, teacher, and chronicler of the mid-century Mexican avant-garde, Kati Horna covered a lot of territory—both physical and creative. The unusual composition of Horna's practice—a mix of “straight” documentary photography, staged shots and narrative series, and photomontage—places her between two major visual languages of the 1930s: photojournalism, which had entered its golden age; and Surrealism, which was gaining international notoriety in its second decade. Though Horna was also in contact with other European avant-garde movements such as Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and Neue Sachlichkeit, it was these twin influences that shaped her work from 1933 through to the 1970s. The pairing is not as incongruous as it might first seem. Surrealism had a notable political agenda—attempting to place “the psychic life of the artist in the service of a broad social rebellion,” as Andy Grundberg has termed it—while some documentary photographers represented the anxieties and detachment of Modern life by locating absurdity and the uncanny in the everyday. Furthermore, the boundary between photographic “truth” and fiction was dissolving as artists and advertising men explored the medium's capacity for manipulation.