The act of collecting has increasingly become a focus of art historians in the last thirty years. Susan Pearce, Mieke Bal, Bruce Althuser and other scholars have written theoretical perspectives illuminating the ways in which the collecting of art influences the identity of a particular collector and in turn the ways in which the process of collecting art itself attaches meanings to objects.

In the last twenty years, there has been a surge in the collecting of Mexican photography dating from the 1920s to the contemporary period. Mexican photography has a long history of being at once an art form and documentation meant to bring social change to the people of Mexico. Tina Modotti was among the first to create photographs of this type in Mexico beginning in the 1920s. Graciela Iturbide is a contemporary photographer who continues to work in a similar manner.

This thesis examines specific collections of photographs taken in Mexico. Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, a Los Angeles couple collects many art objects including Graciela Iturbide photographs. Susie Tompkins Buell, a social activist living in San Francisco also collects objects of art including Tina Modotti photographs. Greenberg, Steinhauser, and Buell use their collections to underscore their own identities as socially conscious people. The collectors’ identities have come to enhance and perhaps supplant the original meanings gleaned from the objects they collect.