In 1923, the Italian-born film actress and budding photographer Tina Modotti moved to Mexico City with her lover Edward Weston, and their shared time there was transformative for them both. In three crucial years in Mexico, Weston was introduced to a wholly new visual world that he would absorb and use in his work going forward. Modotti, who had lived in the city once before and already moved in the city’s artistic and political circles, was influenced by Mexico in a different way. While Weston had far more photographic experience, Modotti was a quick study and was soon creating images which were distinct in both content and aesthetic from her mentor’s.
During their time together in Mexico, Modotti made a small series of portraits of Weston posed with his camera. Modotti’s portraits were different in style and approach from Weston’s. While Weston adopted a consistent head-and-shoulders format in his portraits, Modotti frequently incorporated elements of the environment and the sitter’s personal effects. In the present image Weston cuts an elegant figure, adjusting the lens of his camera while casually holding a pipe in his right hand.
This print was originally in the collection of Sarah Bixby Smith who, with her husband, Paul Jordan Smith, was active in the artistic social scene in Southern California in the early part of the 20th Century. Bixby Smith was famous for her 1925 book Adobe Days, a memoir of her youth in Los Angeles when it was ‘a little frontier town.’ She was president of Los Angeles’s Friday Morning Club, where Edward Weston exhibited his photographs as early as 1914.
