This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In Tina Modotti’s photograph “Workers Parade,” a group of Mexican ejidatorios, or farmers, march en masse, their backs to the camera, their worn sombreros shading their heads in an instantly recognizable symbol of the working class.
To capture the image, of a May Day demonstration in 1926, Modotti had climbed onto a rooftop and used natural light and thoughtful composition to create a picture that fused modernist form with revolutionary purpose.
Copies of the photograph, along with dozens of others, are held in major museum collections, a testament to the growing recognition of her brief but meteoric career.
For years, Modotti’s reputation as an artist had long been obscured by the notoriety of her love affairs with the American modernist photographer Edward Weston and the Cuban Marxist revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. But recent exhibitions, like “Tina Modotti: The Eye of Revolution,” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris last year, have sought to rebalance the narrative of her life and work, highlighting her politically engaging photography and striking portraits of everyday objects.
“It’s very interesting in her work the way she melds modernist forms with social messages,” said Roxana Marcoci, a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which holds more than 30 of Modotti’s photographs, including “Workers Parade.”
“She was so instrumental in making photography socially relevant,” she added, in an interview.
Modotti was self-effacing when describing her work. As she wrote in the journal Mexican Folkways in 1929: “I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art, but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations.”
Tina Modotti was born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini on Aug. 16, 1896, in Udine, a small town in northeast Italy, to Giuseppe Salterni Modotti, a mechanic, and Assunta (Mondini) Modotti, a tailor. She had an older brother and sister. The family name was originally spelled Modotto before it was changed through a clerical error decades before Tina was born.
The family moved to Austria and lived there for several years before Giuseppe left for San Francisco in August 1905, joining a thriving community of Italian immigrants there. Tina joined him in 1913, when she was 16.
She went on to work as a seamstress and modeled clothing at a department store, among other odd jobs. After acting in local theatrical productions, she became a minor celebrity in her lively North Beach neighborhood.
In 1918, Modotti married the writer and painter Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey, who was known as Robo, and the couple moved to Los Angeles, where she continued her acting, performing in silent films like “The Tiger’s Coat” (1920). Their home became a hub for the city’s bohemians, and Modotti soon met Edward Weston, with whom she eventually began a romantic relationship, though he, too, was already married.
Richey left for Mexico City in 1921, spurred by the election of Álvaro Obregón as president of Mexico the year before; Obregón’s government had ushered in a series of reforms and increased support for the arts.
Modotti joined him there once he was settled, but he soon died of smallpox, prompting her to return to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles a devastated widow in need of income. She asked Weston to be her photography mentor, hoping to earn money by making portraits. (Her interest in the art can likely be traced to an uncle who had operated a successful studio in Udine.)
Modotti returned to Mexico City in 1923, this time accompanied by Weston. There, she ran a studio that they had set up together and worked as his translator. As they ensconced themselves in the city’s art scene, they became acquainted with artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
The couple worked on several projects together, including the images for Anita Brenner’s book “Idols Behind Altars: The Story of the Mexican Spirit” (1929), a study of Mexican art and its roots.
On her own, Modotti experimented with decontextualized objects — items shown outside their usual settings, with emphasis placed on their shapes, textures and symbolic qualities. Weston taught her composition and rigorous formalism, an approach that prioritizes a picture’s lines, shapes and composition over its subject matter, in contrast to the more popular pictorialism, which treated photographs like paintings, with soft focus and staged scenes.
Both photographers worked with large-format cameras and printed on platinum and palladium paper. Weston’s influence can be seen in many of Modotti’s early images, such as “Telephone Wires,” “Mexico” and “Calla Lily.”
When it came to content, however, the two went in different directions. Weston was a proponent of “art for art’s sake” — the 19th-century credo that art needed no justification — whereas Modotti’s work became increasingly political, as seen in her photographs of murals by Rivera and José Orozco. (She appeared nude in the 1926 mural “The Abundant Earth” by Rivera, with whom she was rumored to have had a brief affair).
After three years, Weston left Mexico — and Modotti — for good, writing in his diary that the departure “will be remembered for the leaving of Tina”; they maintained a correspondence even as their lives and ideologies diverged.
Modotti remained behind in Mexico City, continuing to run the studio they’d established while beginning work as a translator and a freelance photographer for a communist newspaper, El Machete. Joining the Communist Party, she revealed her evolving politics and her compassion for the worker in photographs like “Worker’s Hands,” a closely-cropped image that sympathetically evokes the realities of labor, and “Illustration for a Mexican Song,” an almost abstract arrangement of a corn cob, a guitar and a bandoleer.
It was through El Machete that Modotti met Jose Antonio Mella, the Cuban Marxist and journalist. The two began a romance — Mella claimed that for him it was love at first sight — that would forever change Modotti’s life. Mella had been exiled from Cuba, but he continued to draw attention as he sought to oust his country’s dictatorship from afar. He was fatally shot on Jan. 10, 1929, while out walking with Modotti. He was 25
The Mexican press tried to implicate Modotti, depicting her as sexually immoral for having posed nude in a number of Weston photographs. Two days after the murder, she was detained for questioning, and though she was cleared, she was dogged long afterward by her reputation as a “loose” woman. (Mella’s assassination, it was found, had been ordered by Cuba’s repressive president, Gerardo Machado.)
President Obregón was assassinated on July 17, 1928. Succeeding governments, as well as Mexican high society, were much less tolerant of the country’s bohemian milieu — and of its communist sympathizers.
On Feb. 4, 1930, an attempt was made on the life of Mexico’s newly elected president, Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Three days later, Modotti was taken in for questioning as part of an anti-communist campaign. Held for 13 days, she was told to renounce her Communist Party membership or face deportation. She chose the latter and was expelled from the country.
Modotti chose to go to Berlin, but she never took to the city’s flourishing avant-garde art scene and had little interest in the newly popular genre of street photography.
“I know that material found on the streets is rich and wonderful,” she wrote in a letter to Weston in May 1930, “but my experience is that the way I am accustomed to work, slowly, planning my composition, etc., is not suited for such work. By the time I have the composition or expression right, the picture is gone.”
So she moved again, this time to Moscow, where her communist politics became further entrenched. She joined the Soviet Communist Party and more or less abandoned photography to devote herself to political work.
When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Modotti went to Spain and volunteered as a nurse for the left-leaning government’s Republican forces battling the right-wing Nationalist rebels.
With the fall of Barcelona in 1939, Republican forces were routed as Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists gained power. Modotti headed for the French border and left for her beloved Mexico, using a Spanish passport and a new name: María del Carmen Ruiz Sánchez.
She worked illegally in Mexico City until her supporters campaigned to have her immigration status changed.
Modotti died on Jan. 6, 1942, while riding in a taxi in Mexico City. She was 45. An autopsy report cited cardiac arrest, but given her age and her political affiliations, there was, and still is, speculation that she was murdered. She was buried in the storied Panteón Civil de Dolores cemetery, her gravestone bearing an epitaph taken from a poem by Pablo Neruda.
In the ensuing years, Modotti and her photographs were largely forgotten. It was not until the 1970s, with rise of the second-wave feminist movement, that she received renewed attention, though by then her work was already in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection thanks to a donation by Weston, who had preserved her work. (He died in 1958.)
For all the acclaim her photographs garnered, however, Modotti perhaps remains best known for being Weston’s lover.
“You see Weston’s photographs of her,” Lisa Volpe, the curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, said by phone, “and then only after that do you get this second chapter about the work she’s made on her own.”
But, Volpe added: “The history of photography is relatively new. And we have the benefit of being able to look at the full scope of it and make corrections.”
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