Tina Modotti lived a remarkable revolutionary life. Born in Italy in 1896 before moving to San Francisco at age sixteen, she soon became a star of stage and screen — and then made her name behind the camera, as a photographer. But in the years when her homeland was taken over by Fascist dictatorship, Modotti was also radicalized politically. During her 1920s spell in Mexico, her varied artistic ventures became intertwined with her comradeship with such figures as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Over the 1930s, her activism as a Communist would see her repeatedly shunted between countries as an exile — and eventually head to the Civil War in Spain.

An especially important focus of Modotti’s political activity until her death in 1942 was International Red Aid, a Comintern-attached organization that defended and offered relief to the victims of political repression. From 1927, she was also an active member of the Mexican Communist Party, a commitment that made its mark on her photographic work in this period. Modotti texts such as On Photography sternly insisted she sought not to be an “artist” but to capture social realities. Works such as “Worker’s Hands” and “Woman from Tehuantepec” documented the dignity, and the hardships, of the Mexican working people.