Tina Modotti, commitment and image
« Italian photographer (1896-1942), Communist militant whose short photographic body of work shaped post-revolutionary Mexico. »
Born in Udine, emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, a Hollywood actress, Tina Modotti followed Edward Weston to Mexico in 1923. She learned the view camera with him, became his muse, his student, then his autonomous rival. Her political still lifes — Bandolier, Corn, Sickle (1927) — fuse form and message.
She was a friend of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, all of whom she photographed. Her images of Mexican peasant women, workers and children broke with the picturesque: a political dignity reads in them. A member of the Mexican Communist Party from 1927, she was expelled from Mexico in 1930.
She then abandoned photography for activism. Present in Berlin, Moscow, the Spanish Civil War alongside the Comintern, she returned to Mexico in 1939 under a false identity. She died in a Mexico City taxi in 1942, at 45, of a suspicious heart attack.