Pine Plains, New York

Andrea Modica is best known for her portrait photography made with a large-format 8x10 camera and printed in platinum and palladium. She received her BFA from SUNY, Purchase and her MFA from Yale, and today she teaches photography at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her first published series, from which two of these images come, was entitled Treadwell (1996) for the small upstate New York town (pop. 200) where they were made. In Treadwell, the artist recorded an extended family of young people over the course of about a decade, often leaving out any sign of an adult presence. She turned her camera, in particular, on a young girl named Barbara, who became the central figure in Modica’s empathetic documentation of the local children, their bleak surroundings, and their imaginary games. Never sentimental, her images of Barbara, her friends, and siblings express a tender pathos that is amplified by the slight soft-focus and rich tonalism of the prints themselves. (Modica continued to make likenesses of Barbara until her death in 2001 of childhood diabetes).