Joan Smith
Death and Taxis
Tina Modotti: Between Art and Revolution
By Letizia Argenteri
Yale Univeristy Press 368pp £25 order from our bookshop
TINA MODOTTI’S SHORT life could hardly have been more eventful, or more tragic. Best known as a photographer, she also worked briefly as an actress before leaving her adopted country, the USA, for revolutionary Mexico. There she photographed ordinary people, creating a small archive of iconic images, joined the vibrant artistic and political circle that gathered around the painter Diego Rivera, and became a committed and apparently unquestioning Communist.
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