Poetry. Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award, chosen by Kathleen Jesme. "WESTON'S UNSENT LETTERS TO MODOTTI inhabits the fluid space between history and imagination," says Kathleen Jesme. "Parmenter's extended persona poem deftly investigates the named but uncommunicated, that which is unfinished, unsent, unlived. Weston exists only as an eye behind the photographic lens, and is unable to fully inhabit the rest of the world, or to send the letters he writes to his sometime model and lover."

Biografie van de Italiaanse fotografe en communistische activiste (1896-1942).

Tina Modotti and Edward Weston arrived in Mexico in 1923 at the start of an extraordinary period of artistic creativity that became known as the Mexican Renaissance. The book traces the interwoven lives and work of Modotti and Weston from the early 1920's in Los Angeles, where they met, until the 1930's, focusing in detail on their time together in Mexico, where virtually all of Modotti's photographs were taken. In bringing together for the first time close to 150 photographs by Modotti and Weston, it reveals the distinctive responses to Mexico of two photographers from widely different backgrounds. At the same time, like other Modernists in Mexico, these two artists self-consciously created work that broke wholly with the immediate past, and fashioned an idiom in defiance of traditional ideas. A selection of images by two Mexican photographers, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Mariana Yampolsky, reveals how indigenous photography was influenced by these two foreigners.

An engaging biography of a dedicated artist and political activist who followed her heart and her ideals and burned out early, leaving a legacy of unforgettable photographs.

"Actress, photographer, muse of artists like Edward Weston and Diego Rivera, political activist and author of pamphlets, Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 - Mexico City, 1942) played an active role in major events of the first half of the 20th century: the cultural ferment of the Mexican renaissance, the Cuban revolution and the heroic period of the Communist International, during which her political commitment was expressed through bold, daring actions. The book paints a vivid multifaceted portrait of this extraordinary woman and includes around a hundred photographs in which her quest for formal perfection is combined with her talent for resolutely and passionately capturing the pulse of life."--Back cover.

Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.

On the surface, the use of photography in autobiography appears to have a straightforward purpose: to illustrate and corroborate the text. But in the wake of poststructuralism, the role of photography in autobiography is far from simple or one-dimensional

For more than fifteen years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society, and his medium. Seldom has an artist written about his life as vividly, intimately, or sensitively. His journal has become a classic of photographic literature.A towering figure in twentieth-century photography, Weston sought to awaken human vision. His restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it created a body of work unrivaled in the medium. For more than fifteen years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society, and his medium. Seldom has an artist written about his life as vividly, intimately, or sensitively. His journal has become a classic of photographic literature.A towering figure in twentieth-century photography, Weston sought to awaken human vision. His restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it created a body of work unrivaled in the medium.

An examination of the personal and professional relationship between two important American photographers.