Soul Searching

The Left Atrium Lifeworks Soul searching here’s an inevitable intimacy that ica spent over a year photographing pace that it requires, compliments the T develops when one looks at the skulls unearthed on the grounds of the thoughtfulness and contemplative photographs of Andrea Modica. Per- Colorado Mental Health Institute in imagination with which she approaches haps it’s the luminescent quality and Pueblo, Colorado. In 1993 prison in- her subject. Paradoxically, Modica has small scale of her prints that force the mates breaking ground for a new hospi- noted that it was because of the formal- viewer to bond with her images. Or tal wing discovered the skeletons of 100 ity and precision of her images that the perhaps it’s the doting attention she people secretly buried in a mass grave a skulls began to take on a more human gives to her subjects that enables us to century ago. A monograph accompany- aura. This humanness is in striking lose ourselves in their stories. Either ing the exhibition includes descriptions contrast to the scientific language used way, whatever the subject, her images by forensic anthropologist Michael to describe the skulls. The forensic de- always engage us in narratives that al- Hoffman of the skulls’ evidence of scription of A15: male, 56 years old, for low us to share in a wider vision. This syphilis, dental abcesses and mental re- example, tells us that there is a lesion blanket of intimacy extends into Mod- tardation. Although Modica’s artistic involving the bone above the left front ica’s recent work, Human Being, which examination is equally precise, it takes a teeth, “probably the result of an premiered at the Edwynn Houk dramatically different direction. abcess.” However, Modica’s image Gallery in New York City from May 10 To make her images, Modica uses stares in quiet contemplation. There is to June 30 this year. an 8” × 10” view camera; this cumber- a desperation in the sad tug of the eyes. Working alongside scientists, Mod- some equipment, and the slow working This is a portrait, not a record of physi- 932 JAMC • 2 OCT. 2001; 165 (7) The Left Atrium cal remains. Repeatedly we see that tle of Treadwell. This while medical examination attempts to work follows an over- reconstruct some aspect of physicality, weight, impoverished Modica’s examination manages to young girl and her fam- reestablish the presence of a soul. ily from rural America Unfortunately, reproductions of as they struggle to sub- these works do not come close to ex- sist. Modica turns that pressing the warmth and breadth of the same empathy to the original photographs. The platinum– contemplation of these palladium process that Modica uses in skulls and our fears of making her 8” × 10” contact prints pro- death. duces a greater tonal range than can be In a time when the achieved in the silver prints more com- predominant method of monly used in black-and-white photog- dealing with thoughts of Copyright Andrea Modica. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York raphy. The beauty of C4: male, 39 years death and dying is to put Andrea Modica, C4: male, 39 years old. Platinum– old lies in the delicate subtlety of the them out of mind, Mod- palladium print, 8” × 10". "Superior view of cranium surface texture, the pattern and the flow ica’s work echoes the resting on its right side ... The cross-shaped pattern of of the suture lines. This beauty and 19th-century practice of sutures is caused, in this case, by the failure of the two softness counteracts our more instinc- creating memento mori developing halves of the frontal bone (to the right) to tive reaction to these images. Nonethe- by photographing the fuse together into a single bone, leaving what is called less, like the “vanities” of 17th-century dead on their death- a 'metopic' suture, an infrequent, but normal, varia- tion whose frequency varies in different populations. still-life painting, the skulls force us to beds or in their coffins. The frontal bone makes up the forehead." contemplate the inevitability of death. Similarly, Modica pho- Modica has gained widespread ac- tographed these skulls claim for her masterful ability to find on the ordinary cardboard boxes in people, people who ended up in an asy- beauty in difficult subject matter. She which they were stored when she first lum and whose bodies went unclaimed made her name with an ongoing series encountered them. These skulls be- after their deaths. Modica not only of photographs published under the ti- come a memento mori of anonymous demonstrates a reverence for each death, but also respect for the person that was. Backed by her fantasies of lives that we will never know in any other way, her photographs allow us to rebuild the imaginary and to invent the stories behind these remains — not only of their physicality, but of their dreams, desires and pleasures. Andrea Modica is a graduate of Yale University. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a teacher at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as well as by private collectors worldwide. A monograph of this work, Human Being, has been released by Nazraeli Press. A selection from this exhibition can be found at www.houkgallery.com. Andrea Modica is represented exclusively by Edwynn Copyright Andrea Modica. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York Andrea Modica, A15: male, 56 years old. Platinum–palladium print, 8” × 10”. “Frontal Houk Gallery in New York. view of cranium with some postmortem damage seen in several cracks and small areas of missing bone. Although difficult to see in this particular photograph, this person has a Jonah Samson well-healed fracture of the tip of the nose ... and a lesion involving the bone just above Fourth-year medical student the sockets for the individual’s left front teeth, probably the result of an abscess ... .” Dalhousie University Halifax, NS CMAJ • OCT. 2, 2001; 165 (7) 933.

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