Austria, Italy, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Berlin, Moscow, Spain, France, and finally, back to Mexico. I left the country for the first time when I was twenty, went to Central America for half the summer and I’m so glad I did because I haven’t traveled internationally since. I worked on farms, and in restaurants, and bought a house instead of traveling: a mix of choices I made and choices made for me. My father was a carpenter, a window washer, and later painted cars on car lots. From him, I learned how to work. Tina Modotti’s parents were Italian migrant workers in Austria—her mother a seamstress, her father a mason or machinist according to different sources. After the family moved back to Italy, she worked in a textile factory though still a child. When she arrived on Ellis Island as a teenager, she had a train ticket to San Francisco, to join her father and sister. While in California, she appeared in silent films including The Tiger’s Coat, her only surviving film. She became photographer Edward Weston’s lover, and he trained her in the art. In Mexico City, she ran with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. She became a communist in 1925. She photographed the Mexican mural movement from 1924 to 1928, and traveled around Mexico capturing the lives of Depression era workers. She died of a heart attack in a taxi at age forty-five, under suspicious circumstances, leaving behind a small, but accomplished body of work. Worker’s Hands, 1927, is a palladium print of roughly worn hands resting on the handle of a shovel.
-Morgan English