Andrea Modica: Best Friends

Andrea Modica is known for the evocative narratives she creates in work such as Best Friends, which explores the deep bonds between high school students in America and Italy. She often works on photographic projects over long periods of time, developing an intimacy and trust with her subjects. In her highly acclaimed series and book Treadwell, she followed the struggles of a girl named Barbara and her family in rural upstate New York from 1986 to 2001. In Human Being, she worked with an anthropologist to make portraits of the skulls of anonymous patients who had been buried in a mass grave in the 1890s in the former Colorado Insane Asylum near Pueblo.

The winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright grant, Modica has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether you go or not, Treadwell was Modica's first major published collection -- a rich, empathetic, and often wrenching study of small town family life in upstate New York. Focusing on one young girl and her extended clan of family and friends, with whom Modica forged a ten-year relationship, the images in Treadwell express pathos and humanity without sentimentality or spectacle.

Treadwell