Andrea Modica’s 40 year long Italian Story

Hailing from Brooklyn, photographer Andrea Modica was born into a third-generation Italian American family. Her grandparents left their homes in Sicily and Naples as children with their families in the 1900s, arriving in New York. But it wasn’t until 1987, two years after receiving her MFA in Photography from Yale University, that Modica visited Italy for the first time. 

“I went to Italy with a train pass and a backpack full of large format equipment, as soon as I had a little money in my pocket,” Modica says. ​“As a young feminist, I was determined to go to the source of how I had been raised. The role of girls and women in the Italian immigrant culture was often in conflict with the mores of my teen years in New York in the 1970s. Simply put, I arrived in Italy curious and confused, two motivating factors that keep me reaching for the camera to this day.” 

Modica landed in Rome and headed south on a train, destination unknown. While travelling, she met a small family traveling to Sicily, who invited her to stay with them and their extended family in the town of Lentini. There she would begin a four-decade journey across the country’s mythic landscape, crafting enigmatic scenes of daily life that form the heart and soul of the new monograph, Italian Story (L’Artiere).

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The book weaves together Modica’s signature platinum prints that shimmer with quiet intensity. Here, scenes of ritual, reflection, and repose invite a languorous gaze at Italy unfolding across regions over decades. The photographs comprise a lifetime of exploration and discovery of the spaces where identity, memory, and belonging mingle and merge. 

“Italian Story is a broad narration: a record of events, a historical fiction,” Modica explains in the book’s brief afterword, her words as succinct as her images are ambiguous. Drawing inspiration from the Italian word storia – which can alternately describe a history, story, romance, situation, issue, fuss, hassle, tale, or lie depending on circumstance – Modica’s photographs transform quiet moments of everyday life into timeless scenes of mystery and wonder. 

“I work with a large camera because I remain obsessed with how the slow and collaborative process informs content,” she says. ​“Information is revealed and people perform while I inevitably bring everything of who I am and what I know to the picture making process. All these things that are in constant flux.” It is here, in this third space that something unplanned occurs – the twinkle of a storia being formed. It is an experience to which Modica has dedicated her life, knowing this series will continue for as long as she is making pictures. 

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While half a dozen of the 69 photographs have appeared in her previous books including Lentini, Theatrum Equorum, and L’Amico del’Cuore, the majority of the images have never been published before. Liberated from their original context and reimagined within a landscape of place, Modica’s work embraces the liminal spaces of poetry and verse. 

“I am astonished by the process of photographing and the resulting image,” she says. ​“Reaching these moments of revelation requires a tremendous amount of work, at least for me, and huge, embarrassing, pitiful failures. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is my deep desire to continue.”

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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