Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti was Edward Weston's model and pupil, became a photographer of real consequence in her own right, gave it up for communist organising, and died in a taxi in Mexico City at forty-five. She was born in Udine, emigrated to San Francisco at sixteen to join her father, worked in textile mills and then as a silent film actress, and went to Mexico with Weston in 1923. She learned from him and then diverged: where his subjects are form, hers are increasingly work and politics - hands of a puppeteer, a labourer's hands resting on a shovel, a bandolier with a guitar and a sickle, workers reading El Machete, which she photographed for the party paper. She joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, was close to Rivera and Kahlo, and after her lover Julio Antonio Mella was shot dead beside her in the street in 1929 she was accused of complicity, tried in the press, and deported the following year. She worked for International Red Aid in Europe and in the Spanish Civil War, stopped photographing almost entirely, and returned to Mexico under a false name in 1939. She died of heart failure in 1942; Pablo Neruda wrote the epitaph on her grave, and rumours of murder circulated for years without evidence. Her photographic career lasted about seven years in total. Roses, made in 1924, sold at auction in 1991 for a record price for a photograph at that time. Her Mexican pictures were shown in a retrospective in 1929 that she called the first revolutionary photographic exhibition in Mexico. She is buried in the Panteon de Dolores in Mexico City.

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