One morning in the mid-90s, the art historian Patricia Albers and her husband drove out to a farm in Oregon, looking for clues that would bring her closer to a woman she had encountered a decade before. She had been perusing an exhibition celebrating the work of California photographer Edward Weston, yet, wandering through the gallery space, it was the photographs of his Italian lover and protege, taken in Mexico in the 1920s, that especially piqued her interest. Who was she, Albers wondered? However, Tina Modotti wasn’t so easy to find. It would take years of detective work for Albers to locate the missing fragments that would bring her subsequent biography, which was published in 1999, to life.
“Modotti lived in eight different countries so it’s hard to fit all the pieces together into a coherent whole,” Albers says from her home in California. That is why her discovery in 1994 of a trunkful of Modotti’s letters and photographs, in a dusty attic in Oregon, was such a pivotal moment. While researching her book, Albers’ sleuthing led her to the family of Modotti’s first partner, the American poet Roubaix “Robo” de L’Abrie Richéy, and to a musty trove that contained more than 100 images by the Italian photographer, mostly small contact prints that had been gifts to Robo’s family. “It was like going through her desk drawers, it had an aroma of the past,” Albers recalls. It also gave her the archival material she needed to finally tell her story.
