Even though Tina Modotti is considered a Mexican photographer because her artistic career was mostly based in Mexico and the American Southwest, she was born in Undine, Italy in 1896. She moved to California in 1913 and was employed in various labor-intensive factory jobs. She was first known mainly because of her relationship with photographer Edward Weston, for whom she was a model in the 1920s; but her abstract, portrait, and still-life photographs “showed her to be an accomplished photographer in her own right” (encyclopedia). In the 1920s, Modotti was active with Mexican revolutionaries, joining the Mexican Communist Party, and having close connections with the Mexican Artists’ Union. When her lover, Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, was found murdered in 1928, she was accused but acquitted of complicity in his murder (encyclopedia). Modotti was eventually deported to Berlin because of her revolutionary ties when there was an assassination attempt on the Mexican president Pascal Ortiz Rubio. From Berlin, she moved to Moscow in 1931 and abandoned photography temporarily in favor of revolutionary causes there. She also lived in France and Spain before returning to Mexico clandestinely in 1939. When back in Mexico, she continued photography and political work until her death of a heart attack in 1942 (encyclopedia). Most of her surviving famous photographs were from her period in Mexico between 1923 and 1926. The photograph entitled “Staircase, 1925” is a good example of an abstract architectural image. Composition features in this work include the use of repetition of a line pattern, and perspective. “It is a picture of space becoming a pattern – a construction of lines and triangles stretched very tightly towards two dimensions – in which depth is both precisely described and subtly denied” (Szarkowski). It bears a resemblance to the drawings of M.C. Escher,...
