Tina Modotti

Italian-born photographer, model, actor and political activist Tina Modotti is the subject of the first installment of La Fabrica’s Essentials, a new series of monographs dedicated to the most fundamental names in photography. Modotti’s highly influential career in photography took place entirely during her years living in Mexico, from 1923 to 1930, during which time she was deeply entrenched in Mexico City’s avant-garde scene and produced a total of just over 400 black-and-white photographs. Before developing her own practice, Modotti was Edward Weston’s favorite model, then lover, darkroom assistant and ultimately, creative partner. She was also close with iconic artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, for whom she photographed many public murals. Her oeuvre, spanning portraiture to photojournalism, fuses the aesthetics of Mexican revolutionary culture and avant-garde photography aesthetics, to which she added the ideals of equality proposed by socialism and her keen political commitment.
Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was born in Udine, Italy and immigrated with her family at the age of 16 to California, where she worked as an artists’ model and an actress. In 1922 she moved to Mexico City where she became heavily involved with the communist party, working for the newspaper El Machete, and later founding the Liga Antifascista de México. In 1930 she was exiled and lived as a political refugee throughout Europe and in Moscow before returning to Mexico under a pseudonym in 1939, where she remained until her early death in 1942.

The apt subtitle of this award-winning biography, Photographer & Revolutionary, sums up the creative tensions that characterized Tina Modotti’s life and brief photographic career. Active as a photographer for only nine years, Modotti was pulled between formal and social concerns. Producing striking modernist compositions of everyday objects, photojournalism of poverty and conflict, and portraits of celebrities and common people alike, Modotti balanced political concerns with formal rigor.

First published in 1993 and long out of print, Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary is the definitive portrayal of Modotti’s life and work. Few photographers are more deserving of a biographical treatment than Modotti, whose work as an actress and artist’s model introduced her to Edward Weston, who was to become her lover. Soon after she arrived in Mexico City with Weston, Modotti became increasingly politicized, working for the communist newspaper El Machete and establishing herself as the go-to photographer for the Mexican Muralist movement. The book includes extensive archival material, interviews with Modotti’s contemporaries and many rare photographs.

Margaret Hooks has written extensively on the life and work of artists, among them Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Max Ernst and Edward James. Her recent writing provides new insight into the relationship and collaborative works of the Surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst.