andrea modica

Here is another photographer whose work I greatly admire and who is included in the “Picturing Childhood” exhibition.

Ten years ago, I took a workshop taught by Andrea in Santa Fe. Even though the class was only a week long, I consider that to have been a pivotal time in the shaping of my work. There were only six students in the class so I got a lot of personal attention from her. (We actually became rather good friends and ended up returning to Santa Fe a year later to take a lighting workshop together.) She was generous with her critiques and challenged me to clarify what I was trying to do and say with my pictures.

Andrea got her MFA from Yale in 1985 and has embarked on various personal projects ever since. She currently teaches at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The work that I love so much is from the portfolio (and monograph) entitled “Treadwell.”

Andrea began the series in 1986, when she was driving by her subject’s home in upstate New York and noticed Barbara (her primary subject) sitting outside. She stopped to speak with her, and eventually the two forged a strong and trusting relationship. Barbara was seven years old at the time she and Andrea began collaborating. Andrea photographed her for fifteen years, until Barbara’s death in 2002.






Using an 8 x 10 inch view camera and natural light, Andrea’s presence in the spaces she photographed must surely have been intrusive; the exposures necessary to make the negatives are many seconds long, and the close perspective of the images means her bulky camera and tripod were virtually on top of the subjects. The authenticity of the images comes not from the so-called reality of the scenes, but from the Andrea’s keen perceptions and subsequent creative decisions made in the darkroom.

In the series we see Barbara grow from a young cherub to a seriously overweight teenager, her growing discomfort painfully evident. Other scenes portray children playing outside in the mud or carcasses of animals decaying at the edge of the woods. The images are brooding and dark. The rich and subtle tones of her laboriously made platinum-palladium prints bring forth the mood even more. For all the unsettling subject matter, these pictures are at once lovely, sympathetic and reverent.