Andrea Modica

Neither documentary images nor portraiture, in Andrea Modica’s photographs something is slightly askew—the full activity of every frame is never entirely revealed, but it is never completely concealed either. Focus shifts from back to front and side to side. Using a large-format camera, Modica presents pictures wherein hands obscure faces, and torsos stretch out of the frame or only appear in the background as distant details. Even when Modica abandons the devices of framing and focus, she nevertheless succeeds in achieving the same results by way of the clarity of her juxtapositions—the image of a young boy holding the severed tail of a goat, for instance, is potent and mysterious. In these moments, and they occur throughout her work, Modica creates open-ended narratives where fact and fiction merge and blur, demonstrating to the viewer instances in which uncertainty and caution meet anticipation and hope.

After receiving her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1985, Modica was a professor in the Art Department at the State University of New York College at Oneonta for 13 years—today, she lives in Philadelphia where she is on the faculty of Photography at Drexel University.  Her work is included in permanent collections throughout New York City, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as in the collections of the George Eastman House in Rochester, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Modica’s photographs have been exhibited extensively and published in three monographs: Minor League of 1993, Treadwell of 1996, and Human Being of 2001. Modica is a Guggenheim Fellow, and she participated in Light Work’s artist-in-residence program in 1993.