Traven was taught photography in the 1920s by Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. His extraordinary talent as a photographer, developed in the state of Chiapas, is evident in the aesthetic and dramatic photos taken to remember situations, places and people, in order to write his novels. Traven had a unique ability to capture the soul of people, of societies, of places and of things around him. 

A collection of Tina Modotti photos which belonged to the B. Traven Estate are presently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His anthropology book Land of Springtime (Land des Frühlings) contains sixty four pages of photographs taken by him on an expedition to Chiapas in 1926. The B. Traven Archive holds a vast collection of unpublished photographs, negatives and photo log books, as well as the four different cameras he used to take them.