Marvelous Portraits by Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston (1886 – 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called:

“one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…” and “one of the masters of 20th century photography.”

Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a:

“quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography”

because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.

Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.

In 1947 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

Edward Weston, Portrait of Ruth St. Denis, 1916 via

Edward Weston, Unidentified Woman, 1920 via

Tina Modotti, Glendale. Photograph by Edward Weston, 1921 via

Edward Weston. Frida Kahlo, 1930 via

Xenia Kashevaroff photographed by Edward Weston in 1931. This portrait is now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art via

Edward Weston, Charis Wilson, 1941 The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston via

A Collection of Photos by Tina Modotti (1896 – 1942)

Tina Modotti (1896 – 1942) was an Italian photographer who was active in Mexico.  Modotti was born to a poverty-stricken family in the northern Italian province of Udine. Some have suggested that Modotti was introduced to photography as a young girl, as her uncle, Pietro Modotti, maintained a photography studio.

She emigrated to New York in 1913 with her mother and her siblings when she was 16 to reunite with her father who had left earlier.  After a brief stay, they moved to San Francisco, and Tina went to work in a textile factory. The very poor working conditions left an indelible impression on her. She left the textile factory to start a career in dressmaking, and, at the same time, she was taking part in local Italian theatrical productions.

Tina Modotti, quickly began living an exuberantly bohemian life style. In 1915 she met an artist named Roubaix de L’Abrie Richey, and they married approximately two years later. They relocated to Los Angeles where Tina entered the glitzy world of Hollywood and got parts in several silent films often playing the femme fatale. She appeared in several plays, operas, and silent movies in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also worked as an artist’s model. Modotti’s movie career culminated in the 1920 film The Tiger’s Coat. She had minor parts in two other films.

Her home was a gathering place for many bohemian artists which included Edward Weston, the famous photographer, and they began a passionate affair despite the fact that they were both married. They moved to Mexico City in 1923. There he taught her photography. Modotti’s early platinum prints were close-up photographs of still-lifes such as wine glasses, folds of fabric or flowers. She also made prints of finely composed architectural spaces. By 1927, when she joined the Communist Party, she was starting to incorporate more overt social content in her work. She also gave up making expensive and time-consuming platinum prints in favour of silver gelatin prints. She focused on the proud faces and hands of mothers, children, artisans and labourers. She was deported from Mexico for her political activities in 1929; during the next decade she dedicated herself to revolutionary and anti-fascist activities in Russia and Spain and took few photographs. In 1939 she returned to Mexico City. In 1942, during a visit by her close friend, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, Modotti died from heart failure in Mexico City under what is viewed by some as suspicious circumstances.

Although Modotti photographed from 1923–32, her work is relatively scarce. Modotti’s work was rediscovered in the United States when 90 vintage prints were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996. Martha Chahroudi, the museum’s curator of photography, organized the exhibit.

Tina Modotti by Edward Weston

Tina Modotti by Edward Weston

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti, 1926

Tina Modotti, 1924

Film Career – Tina Modotti in The Tiger´s Coat

Tina Modotti in the The Tiger’s Coat