The big picture: Andrea Modica’s summertime swimmers

Two men idle in a summertime pond surrounded by reeds, one on his back with his face to the sky, the other standing (or treading water) with his gaze cast down. They seem almost entirely disconnected from one another, but the ripples emanating from the man in the background skew ever so slightly the shadow of the other man’s head. Otherwise, the latter is totally caught in his own world. Is he contemplating the water’s depths, or does the direction of his gaze suggest something darker?

This photograph appears near the start of Andrea Modica’s luminous new monograph Italian Story, which gathers material from the past four decades, primarily taken in Italy and shot entirely with an 8x10 large-format camera. Modica did not intend for all these images to come together in a single book. Some were taken in early-1990s Sicily, while she was travelling on a Fulbright scholarship. Others arose from later visits as her career took off, thanks to works such as Minor League and Treadwell, and she was invited back to lecture in Italy.

She met the man in the foreground of this picture during one of those lectures, in Tuscany in the late 1990s; he was acting as her translator. Years later they met again and started a relationship that lasted more than a decade. This photograph was taken around the midpoint, during a visit to upstate New York, and one could search his expression for clues as to the relationship’s trajectory. Modica is more interested in the photograph’s composition. “With the big camera there’s always a struggle, which I embrace, of getting things still, getting people not to blink, and to throw in water with a relatively long exposure is adding to the challenge.”

Then there’s the struggle of photographing the same person over many years and figuring out ways of making each picture different and surprising. Whatever the emotional demands of the relationship, which has now ended, creatively “it demanded that I push myself”, Modica says. The results in Italian Story are clear to see.

Italian Story by Andrea Modica is published by L’Artiere on 30 April