Tina Modotti was a photographer, actress and political activist. Her career as a photographer only spanned about 9 years, but yielded some very important works. Tina Modotti was born in 1896. At the age of 16, she moved from her native Italy to the United States with her father. Modotti soon developed an interest in performing arts and appeared in several plays, operas and silent movies while living in San Francisco. Five years later, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film.
Tina showed an interest in photography from an early age. Her uncle Pietro Modotti ran a photography studio in Italy and later her father ran a similar studio in San Francisco. After moving to Los Angeles with her boyfriend Robo Richey, Tina soon became friends with Edward Weston. Weston is one of the founders of modernist photography. It is impossible to overestimate Weston's influence on photography in America, or, at the outset, on Modotti. Weston became a
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By this time, Tina had been a member of the Mexican Communist Party for several years and her work was very politically focused. In 1929, she was with a companion, a popular revolutionary writer named Julio Antonio Mella, when he was assassinated on the street. The murder drew a glare of publicity to Modotti's lifestyle and politics, and she was deported from Mexico, finally ending up in the Soviet Union. The incident spelled the end of Modotti's photographic inspiration. She took few pictures of note afterward, finally abandoning photography to work as a propagandist and organizer for Stalin. She eventually returned to Mexico, living there under a false name until less than a year before her death in 1942.Two years later, Modotti died under somewhat suspicious circumstances though the official autopsy indicated heart failure. She was