CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/10/2019

Private entertainments or public show in 'Frida Kahlo: Her Photos'?

This 1930 photograph of Frida Kahlo, pregnant, at Casa Azul—the family home she shared with Diego Rivera in Coyoacán, Mexico City—is reproduced from Frida Kahlo: Her Photos, a featured title at SHOPPE OBJECT 3.0. On the back, Kahlo has written, "Here's a picture of your girl in August 1930, and to you she dedicates this photo with buten [sic] of amore. Freon." Casa Azul provides the setting for many of the most dramatic and fascinating photographs in this collection. "Amidst an array of exotic animals—parrots, xoloescuintle dogs, monkeys and deer—the guests in the Casa Azul were part of the private entertainments (paintings, letters, diaries, drawings, and photographs) that would soon be transformed into a public show," Laura González Flores writes. "These photographs are fascinating not because of the objective information we can draw from them, but because the Casa Azul social drama is congealed in them in a kind of everlasting present." Some, however, "accidentally unveil that which the mask-image has striven to hide."