Tina Modotti
Tina Modotti, Women of Tehuantepec, c. 1929
Tina Modotti, Peasant Reading El Machete, Newspaper of the Communist Party, 1927
Tina Modotti, Hands of a Worker with Shovel, c. 1927
Tina Modotti, from Portraits of Mexican Children, 1928
Tina Modotti, Worker’s Parade, 1926
Tina Modotti, Bullets, Corn and Guitar, 1927
Tina Modotti, Woman with Flag, 1928
Born in Italy in 1896, Tina Modotti immigrated to San Francisco at age 16. She moved to Los Angeles where she acted in several silent films including The Tiger’s Coat in 1920. Soon thereafter she met the photographer Edward Weston with whom she studied photography and modeled. Modotti and Weston traveled together in Mexico in the early 1920s, setting up a portrait studio in Mexico City. When Weston returned to the United States, Modotti remained and became very involved in Mexico’s revolutionary atmosphere, joining the Communist Party in 1927. She was commissioned to document the mural work of Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros and was friends with photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Accused of conspiracy in the murder of a young Cuban, Modotti was expelled from Mexico in 1930, later fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1942, she died under suspicious circumstances shortly after returning to her beloved Mexico.
