ABSTRACT
(First published in Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5, No. 4, Mexico City, 1929)
Tina Modotti first arrived in Mexico in 1922 and settled there the following year with her lover Edward Weston. Although she learned her craft as his apprentice, her photographic work soon took its own directions, inflecting Weston’s formalist aesthetic with a subject matter shaped by political perceptions - of class and gender, of revolutionary ferment in Mexico. The following short article reflects the same optimism invested in the camera’s potential as a tool for new ways of seeing that characterised the European avant-gardes. It is an attitude inseparable from Modotti’s belief that photography’s merits derived from its multiple aspects.
