Tina

Tina --I'm sorry . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6msBslZHahc

Biography from YouTube posting (thanks!):

Tina Modotti (1896 -- 1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and leftist who once playfully described her profession as "men".She acted in several silent movies in the early 1920s and later became a model for prominent photographers and artists of the time.

By 1926, Modotti was an accomplished photographer in her own right, often publishing her work in left wing and Communist papers.Modotti immigrated to the United States in 1913. There she met the photographer Edward Weston and his assistant Margrethe Mather. By 1921, Modotti was Weston's favorite model and, by October of that year, his lover.

Modotti's husband seems to have responded to this by moving to Mexico in 1921. Following him to Mexico City, Modotti arrived two days after his. In 1923, Modotti returned to Mexico City with Weston and one of his four sons, leaving behind Weston's wife and remaining children.Modotti and Weston quickly gravitated toward the capital's bohemian scene, and used their connections to create an expanding portrait business.

It was also during this time that Modotti met several political radicals and Communists, including three Mexican Communist Party officials who would all eventually become romantically linked with Modotti.

Modotti is thought to have been introduced to photography as a young girl in Italy, where her uncle, Pietro Modotti, maintained a photography studio. Years later in the U.S., her father opened a similar studio in San Francisco, where her interest undoubtedly developed further. However, it was her relationship with Edward Weston that was to allow her to gravitate upward to become a world class photographer.

Exiled from her adopted home in Mexico, Modotti moved around Europe for a while, finally settling in Moscow where, by most accounts, she joined a branch of the Soviet secret police. During the next few years she engaged in various secretive missions on behalf of the Russians (though probably for "World Revolution" in her mind) in France and Eastern Europe. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Vidali (then known as "Comandante Carlos") and Modotti (using the pseudonym "Maria") left Moscow for Spain, where they stayed and worked until 1939. In April 1939, following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti left Spain with Vidali and returned to Mexico under a pseudonym.

Modotti died in Mexico City in 1942 under what was viewed by some as suspicious circumstances.

Poet Pablo Neruda composed Tina Modotti's epitaph, part of which can also be found on her tombstone http://www.odebate.com.br/downloads/tina/Figuras/Ti_tumba.jpg

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being

In 1926 Diego Rivera's wife Lupe Marín asserted that her separation from her husband was caused by his affair with Tina, a byproduct of Tina's nude modeling for him for the murals as "the Abundant Earth" at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, near Texcoco [1926-27]. Their affair lasted for about a year and he painted her five times in the Chapingo murals, including as "The Earth Enslaved", "Germination" and "Virgin Earth"• "In the Arsenal", Secretaría de Educación Pública Building, Mexico City, 1928This painting was part of the break between Modotti and Rivera caused by his expulsion from the Communist Party.