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 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. This unusual portrait of a tiny baby lying on a blanket on the ground was made more than a decade later in Pine Plains, New York, but is very related to that earlier series in its somewhat disorienting and unsettling approach.