Tina Modotti, 1896-1942, was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century. A woman of enormous courage, both in life-threatening situations and her challenging of women's traditional roles, Tina Modotti's life became the stuff of myth and legend. Based on years of painstaking research in Mexico, Europe and the United States, Tina Modotti - Photographer and Revolutionary includes a wealth of new material and is a major step toward demythologizing the life of one of the most fascinating women of an extraordinary era. In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston. On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there. Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo and Latin American exiles plotted revolution. Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico's muralists, including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics. In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontai, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. She carried out dangerous Comintern missions in fascist Europe, became an apparatchik in the early years of Stalinism, and played a key role in the Spanish Civil War. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death.

Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary

Arts & Photography

Margaret Hooks

Photography & Video

Harpercollins

Traces the life and career of the Italian-born actress, model, and photographer, describes her relationship with Edward Weston, and recounts her involvement with social and political issues

HarperCollins, Publishers

Despite her brief career in photography, Tina Modotti is now considered one of its pre-eminent twentieth-century proponents. In a seven-year period she achieved a standard that other artists took a lifetime to reach, and recognition of the importance of her work in this field is evidenced by an ever-growing interest in the life and output of this remarkable woman and pioneer of modern photography. From an early age, Modotti was exposed to the most radical ideas of the first half of the twentieth century and she opted to ride the crest of the transformations these inspired. Though she was born more than a century ago, her story is essentially modern - rooted in being poor, female and foreign in America. Modotti's trajectory thrust her into the midst of some of the century's most dramatic experiences of social upheaval - post-revolutionary Mexico, Berlin during the rise of Fascism, early Stalinist Russia and Spain during the Civil War. She showed enormous personal courage, not only in life-threatening situations but also in her defiance of tradition, particularly in her emotional and career decisions. She chose sexual independence over marriage, political commitment in place of personal security and eventually revolution above art.

Tina Modotti (55s)

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

"Interviews with more than 40 Guatemalan women in the late 1980s, all but two in Spanish (even though they were mostly ethnically indigenous). Notes that most successful interviews came when the subject herself 'directed' the process. Their voices tell a series of clear 'short stories' on wide array of themes, roughly grouped together under the headings of work, being Indian, family, and resistance"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/

Guatemalan Women Speak

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Epica Task Force

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Margaret Hooks. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Margaret Hooks

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Margaret Hooks. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary

Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary

Tina Modotti (55s)

Guatemalan Women Speak