A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

106 - Andrea Modica

Episode Summary

Andrea Modica on the act sometimes being more important than the result, not being deterred by gender bias and getting ‘her hands in the clay’ with the 8x10 camera.

Episode Notes

Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches as professor of photography at Drexel University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of a Knight Award. Andrea is perhaps best known for her portrait photography and for her use of black and white film, shot on an 8"x10" view camera and printed using the platinum-palladium process.

Her books include Treadwell (Chronicle), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Barbara (Nazraeli), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions) and most recently As We Wait (L’Artiere), now in its second edition and more recently a collection of portraits of ‘Mummer Wenches’, titled January 1 (L’Artiere). Her latest book, featuring work shot over a 30 year period, is Lentini (KGP) and her upcoming is a book of photographs made at a horse clinic in Italy, titled Clinica Equina Bagnarola (Tis Books).

Andrea’s photographs have been featured in such prominent publications as the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Newsweek, she has had solo exhibitions at numerous prestigious museums and her photographs are part of the permanent collections of several of them.

On episode 106, Andrea discusses, among other things:

The act sometimes being more important than the result
How she earnt money shooting real estate
Not being deterred by gender bias
Getting ‘her hands in the clay’ with the 8x10 camera
Her book, Treadwell
Recent book project, Lentini
Instagram
Her current horse hospital project: Clinica Equina Bagnarola

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“Using the big camera, processing film, washing it, waiting for it to dry, making proof prints, looking at those, deciding - which sometimes take quite a while - if anything is worthy of printing further, and then deciding if it’s worth keeping. That’s when my hands are really in the clay...”