What Do Lynn Hershman Leeson, Edward Weston, Diego Rivera, and Pablo Neruda Have in Common?
Lynn’s unending capacity to re-imagine personal identity, performance, surveillance, voyeurism, and interactivity across media has contributed to her status as a groundbreaking feminist and new media artist. She shares this chameleonic characteristic with the late great actor, photographer, and activist Tina Modotti (1896-1942). As Sarah Coleman, in a review of Patricia Alber’s Modotti biography Shadows, Fire, Snow, quotes:
Modotti was a “shape-shifter,” a woman who was, at different times, an actress, a photographer, a revolutionary and an international undercover agent. By the time she died, in 1942 at the age of 45, Modotti had packed several lifetimes into one short span.
Modotti in the 1920 film The Tiger's Coat.
Sound familiar? We thought so.