Tina Modotti, known to a few as the beautiful Italian actress in Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed, was also a dedicated political activist and a photographer whose best work has a powerful dignity and integrity. She lived with Edward Weston in postrevolutionary Mexico in the 1920s. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, she was a nurse in Madrid and on various fronts. In Spain she knew Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda, who wrote a poem about her after her death in Mexico in 1942. Margaret Gibson's Memories of the Future is based on Modotti's vivid but enigmatic life. Drawn from daybooks that Gibson imagines Modotti to have kept at the end of her life in Mexico City, these poems give us the reflections of a woman whose intensity and vision, evident in her own photographs, are matched by the depth and breadth of her experience and personal transformation in times of deep social and political upheaval.