ABSTRACT
(Extracted from The Archive, No. 22, January 1986, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona)
Despite the high market value now placed on her work, Tina Modotti’s achievements as a photographer have been paradoxically overshadowed by her status as legend. The glamour of her association with Edward Weston, as lover and model, then as apprentice, her noted beauty and the dramatic events of her life all invest her with such an aura of sexuality and heightened presence that her work by comparison occupies less space than its qualities merit. Weston’s photographs of her play an obvious part in this process of constructing Tina the beauty, Tina the legend at the expense of a Tina seen without the contradictions of attachment to him.
These were Modotti’s last letters to Weston, written in a period when their love affair was in the past; Weston was living in California and Modotti’s partner Julio Antonio Mella had been assassinated in January 1929. The concluding letters illuminate the difficulties Modotti faced in Berlin after her deportation from Mexico, and they cast an interesting sidelight on photographic activity in Weimar Germany.
