by Jerome D. Introduction Tina Modotti (1896–1942) is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of photography — an Italian-born actress, model, political activist, and photographer whose brief but intense career in Mexico during the 1920s produced some of the most politically charged and formally inventive images of the early modernist era. Born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini in Udine, Italy, she received little formal education before emigrating with her family to San Francisco in 1913, where she worked as a seamstress and then as a stage and film actress. Through her husband, the artist Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey (known as Robo), she moved in a circle of bohemian artists and socialists in Los Angeles. It was there, in 1921, that she met and fell in love with the American photographer Edward Weston , who would become both her creative mentor and her artistic equal. After Robo's death from smallpox in Mexico City in 1923, Modotti and Westo...
"The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera" - Dorothea Lange