When the Italian photographer Tina Modotti moved to America in 1913, age 17, she traveled on a steamship from Genoa, $100 to her name. Modotti made it to San Francisco where she worked as a seamstress, then model, then performer in the theater and opera. Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles, where she acted in a few silent movies and met the photographer Edward Weston. Modotti became his muse and assistant; he taught her how to use a camera. The pair opened a studio in Mexico City in the 1920s, attractive to the city’s avant-garde artists—Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and Lupe Marín. Modotti photographed the Mexican mural movement extensively, as well as the growing city’s urban scapes and home interiors. She died young from heart failure, in 1942. This is the largest exhibition thus far on the formidable Modotti. —Elena Clavarino