Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

Corey Armpriester- Your curiosity about how the meat on your plate got there is what inspired the “Fountain” series?
Andrea Modica- Yes. My move to Colorado in 1998 fed this curiosity. I met the Bakers in 2000, after much research and effort to find access to a slaughterhouse with my camera.

I began photographing the slaughtering process at the Bakers’ slaughterhouse with my 8X10 camera in 2000 and continued to work there until 2008. Using a large format camera demands a slow and, when working with people, collaborative effort. My final prints are hand-made platinum/palladium contact prints, a 19th century process that I favor for its beauty and richness of tone. The prints are made on vellum. I also choose this antiquated process because I love to physically make the prints, by hand, in a darkroom.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

After a while, I began photographing the kids in the family, sometimes with animals or animal parts and sometimes without- sometimes inside the slaughterhouse, sometimes outside. I often photographed them in my house or in theirs. The last photographs, which I believe to be among the most successful, were made in their basement. The project continued until 2008, ending because I moved back to the east coast to teach at Drexel University.

CA- What is the meaning behind the title “Fountain”?
AM- Fountain is the name of the town in Colorado where the Bakers have lived and worked for generations. It’s a very hopeful name for a city and for the project; I got lucky.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- How long did you live with the Baker family?
AM- I never lived with the Bakers, but we spent a lot of time in each other’s homes. I lived in Manitou Springs, CO and the Bakers live in Fountain, CO. Fountain is about a half hour drive from Manitou Springs.

CA- Did you participate in the slaughtering of the animals?
AM- In general at the Baker slaughterhouse, the men and boys do the slaughtering and the women and girls do the butchering. I was in the back, butchering with the women and girls.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- What is your favorite meat product?
AM- I generally like it all. However, I was offered horsemeat while in Italy last week and declined.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Did the Bakers have any opinions about vegetarianisms?
AM- We never discussed it, but I suspect that if I had asked to photograph at their slaughterhouse as a vegetarian, they might have said no. They knew from the beginning that I eat meat.

CA- Were there certain aspects of the Baker family’s life that was off limits to your camera?
AM- The family never put limits on what I photographed. However, the parents saw all the photographs over the years, as the project progressed. I never put any photograph into the world without their seeing it first.

CA- Do you still keep in-touch with the Bakers?
AM- Yes.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Who were you closest to in the Baker family and why?
AM- I was probably closest to the teen-age girls: Brittany, Ivy and Tara, as well as their niece Katelynn. Until 2001 I traveled a great deal from Colorado to photograph in upstate New York, where I had lived for years. I was spending as much time as possible with Barbara, a girl whom I had been photographing for nearly 15 years. She was the main character of my book Treadwell, someone I had become very close to, and she was dying. Photographing the healthy girls from Fountain offered tremendous relief every time I returned from photographing Barbara.

CA- Can human beings claim to love animals if we eat and wear them?
AM- This is an ethical question that each of us has to answer for ourselves.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Where does photojournalism end and art begin?
AM- Only in my opinion, a great photojournalist does what any great photographer will do: be completely aware of what’s in front of him/her and bring everything of his/her experience to the process of making the picture.

CA- Do you call yourself an artist or photographer?
AM- Either, I don’t spend much time thinking about things like that. Instead, I prefer to be photographing or in the darkroom, a place that brings me great joy. I also returned to drawing last year, after many years away from the medium. I don’t feel the process of drawing is very different from what I do as a photographer.

CA- What’s the best way to gain the trust of the people that you photograph?
AM- Tell the truth.

CA- In what ways do your students influence your work?
AM- When they’re truly in love with photography, and they often are, they’re awake and inventive, fearless of making mistakes, reminding me that there’s no true success in taking the safe route when being creative.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankee, Nick Del Vecchio, 1992, 10 x 8 platinum/palladium contact print

In Andrea Modica: Minor League, Modica’s 18 farm team portraits are breathtaking in the physicality and vulnerability of young men, many still showing traces of boy. The photographs, contact prints of an 8×10 camera, are more than portraits. They are testimony of a subculture of athletics, competition, fierceness, and the desire to succeed.

Some of these guys broke my heart. They are men-in-waiting, yearning to get in the game. The farm teams are trials they must get beyond, opportunities that likely will not play out for most of them.  But it’s here that they learn the rules of the game. Not the game of baseball, but the game of baseball society, in which the ways to express emotion are ritualized and vetted for their macho qualities.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Ray Suplee and Kraig Hawkins (embrace), 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

So the more intimate images of young men embracing are shocking expressions of tenderness not allowed in the majors. What the big leagues allow are celebratory piles of bodies, rump bumps, shoulder pushes, and sideways grins.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Kraig Hawkins and Rich Turentine, 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

There’s a funny thing that happens to men in uniform. The uniforms may turn them into a team on the field, but up close the uniforms increased my awareness of the individuality of each body, each face, each expression.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankee, Matt Luke, 1992, 10x8 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

Some of the men are scarred. One has a swollen eye. In contrast to their scarred freshness is a portrait of LA Dodger Darryl Strawberry in 1993–the most recent of the photos and the only one taken of a major leaguer–the 19th photo in the show. He looks well-worn, with streaks of sweat and an indentation line above his brow, perhaps from all these years of wearing a baseball cap. The innocence is gone and the weight of high hopes has been replaced by the weight of responsibility.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Sandi Santiago and Mike Buddie, 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

A photo of two men in batting cages and one young man peering out from his catcher’s mask are reminders of how entrapped everyone becomes by the paths they have chosen in life.

Andrea Modica, Darryl Strawberry, LA Dodger, 1993, 10x8 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

The quality of detail in these photos, the sense of skin and light, is marvelous. They are 8×10 platinum/palladium contact prints, and other than the Strawberry, they were all taken in 1991 and 1992.

Toshio Shibata, Kanazawahakkei, Yokohama City, Japan (N-65), 1984

In Toshio Shibata’s exhibit Expressway the human form is invisible but implied. We are looking at the works of man and the light tracks left in the wake of the cars in which he travels. These 11 works are nightscapes of highways, rest stops, and toll areas, most of them in Japan, but really places without countries. They are everywhere and nowhere at once, detached from the daily experiences of chores, responsibilities and relationships.

Toshio Shibata, Moriya Service Area, Jyoban Expressway, Japan (N-40), 1986, 20 x 24 inches

In these nightscapes (4×5-inch camera, gelative silver prints), the darkness gets absorbed into the photo paper, leaving luminous tracks and spots of glowing light. The backs of industrially shaped circles reflecting light, the lit arcades of toll areas, the isolated lit interiors of phone booths, the archway of a tunnel illuminated by headlights create Hopperesque noir moods of loneliness and detachment. But unlike in Hopper, these lit-up points suggest a spiritual destination that beckons and promises.

Toshio Shibata, Totsuka Interchange, Yokohama Yokosuka Highway, Japan (N-08), 1983, 20 x 24 inches

These rarely exhibited photographs all date to the mid 1980s, but they seem fresh. The song of the open road is captured warts and all, a Lolitaland that mixes purpose, promise and failure all at once.

The exhibit will be up through June 12.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith), 1976. Oil and magna on linen canvas, 72 x 50 ¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.Barkley L. Hendricks, Tequila, 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 60 ¾ x 50 ¼ inches. Collection of the Butler Institute for American Art, Youngstown, OH.

I was struck by, how in a funny reversal of expectation, Hendricks’ paintings, with their blank backgrounds and fashion focus, come out of a recent photographic tradition, while so many of the photographs in Personal Views come more directly out of the painting tradition, in which sitters pose with symbols of their worth.

Hendricks’ portraits also reference religious icons, an association that elevates his subjects to sainthood. Some of the paintings glow with an ethereal light; and some of them have iconic gilt backgrounds. Surrounded by nothing but ether, with no details of the urban environment from where they come, these subjects are well-positioned to communicate their self-worth with sartorial splendor. They come without pedigree and create their own individuality. It’s costume as self-invention. And Hendricks loves and admires them for being exactly who they are.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people – Bobby Seale), 1969, Oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf on linen canvas, 59 ½ x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is not art as fashion design; this is art with a political subtext. The scale is confrontational, grand and powerful at the same time that the figures are non-threatening. The iconoclasm in Icon for My Man Superman, a portrait of Bobby Seale, takes both Superman and Seale off pedestals, humanizing the cartoon, humorizing the man. Barkley Hendricks loves his subjects and loves people. It comes through loud and clear. He is legitimizing, embodying, making visible. It’s a gentle approach to a social revolution.

Sarah Stolfa, Benton, MS, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

Sarah Stolfa’s, Zoe Strauss’ and Justyna Badach’s portraits at Gallery 339 may provide environment in the tradition of Rembrandtian burghers, but their subjects are not exactly burghers. not the usual powerful or moneyed class who can afford to commission Annie Leibovitz.

Justyna Badach, Rourke, 2009, Archival Pigment Print, 23" x 30"; Edition of 3; 31" x 40"; Edition of 3

Badach’s photos of bachelors are sad, the men isolated in forlorn environments of their own choosing and creation. These photos have no lushness to them, but the question of who we are looking at and why is plenty of a draw, with or without the statements Badach displays with the photos.

Sarah Stolfa, Memphis, TN, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

In Stolfa’s current series on view, which references Robert Frank and Alec Soth, there’s a question of intention. She lets the subjects project who they are. But she cannot cross the social divide in the same way that she did in her portraits across the bar at McGlinchey’s.  Stolfa means to disconcert her viewer. And I suspect she herself is disconcerted by the kitchen worker with the gun at her waist. In this sense, Stolfa’s portraits are less about the individuals, and more about a cultural divide between northern and southern values.

Zoe Strauss, Bunny, 2001, Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 30 inches

Not so in Strauss’s work, where the people’s faces become a roadmap away from Britney and Joan Rivers, a different vision from the media circus of what it means to be human. Strauss is the Walt Whitman of Philadelphia photographers, singing her love for an entire side of the culture otherwise ignored. But unlike the romanticizer Hendricks, Strauss keeps the hard-scrabble environment and the hard-nosed realism, be it no makeup or too much makeup.

Andrea Modica, Sicily 7, 1990, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print, 8 x 10 inches, Edition of 20

Also in the show at 339 are Andrea Modica’s sociological photographs of Italians who have been largely untouched by glamor shots and the notion of performing for the camera; Rita Bernstein’s painterly photographs that are less about portraiture than mood and light and material; Jessica Todd Harper’s portraits of middle-class comfort, which seem closest to the burgher portraits of the Dutch golden age of painting; and Nadine Rovner’s setups, which are less about the individual people and more about cinematic mise-en-scenes.

a portrait by Josh Rickards

PS: I saw Josh Rickards at BYOTY at Little Berlin while I was thinking about the photos and Hendricks, so then I gave some thought to what Rickards is doing. He, like Hendricks, takes the subject out of a real environment. Sometimes the background is a blank color, but sometimes he creates a flat, abstracted environment that represents a milieu, a time and a place. And his stylized faces, which draw from craft veneer drawing, emphasizes the deadpan ordinariness of his subject. These are not so much personal portraits; they are pictures of a lifestyle and subculture.

Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia is up through November 14, 2009 and Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is up to January 3, 2010.

Something old, something new, something borrowed and cyanotype are mixing things up at Project Basho.

My first visit there ever was Thursday, and I drove by the place twice, on a street where there were no other options. Finally I asked a rare passerby for help and he directed me to the only place with lights on. Duh.

Basho is one of the city’s new co-op darkrooms that opened in the past year. It’s on Germantown Ave., a couple of blocks north of Girard.

The exhibit there, ONWARD ’08, is a juried group show, capturing the photographic zeitgeist and the real life zeitgeist at the same time that it explores a wide variety of photographic processes.

The juror is the well-known photographer Andrea Modica, who teaches at Drexel. She went through the work of nearly 300 photographers and more than 1,000 pictures to whittle the show down to 59.

Adam Davies, James Street, Pittsburgh, C-print, 20 x 24 inches

I found myself especially interested in the images of modern life that belie the images we like to project about ourselves through television, movies and advertising. Adam Davies‘ James Street, Pittsburgh, shows a cityscape backyard that fits none of the conventions of landscape or cityscape, with its lower levels representing the hidden lives of people who certainly are nothing like the Cleavers. The view is lush and paradise-like–with a sense of disorder. Although this is not a staged photo, I couldn’t help but think of Jeff Wall and his undercurrent of an underworld.

Andrew Warren’s Black Cadillac, Rosindale, MA, shows an old, dull Cadillac parked by the curb on an undistinguished street. The vehicle is no treasured relic of the car culture–it’s the anti-Richard Prince, the anti-Robert Bechtle. Its ordinariness is the surprise.

And Kara Vuong’s Jung, is a black and white picture of a huge, Asian-looking young man sitting on a floor of classic checkerboard tiles, playing a little ukelele (i think). This too was a person and circumstance that our culture fails to represent as it tells the story of who we are and how we live.

Keiko Hiromi, Monadnock St., Silver Gelatin print, 11 x 14 inches

Similarly, Keiko Hiromi‘s Monadnock St. shows a pair sprawled on the bed amidst the cramped chaos of their lives. The relationship is unclear, but a sense of exhaustion and heat permeates all.

Adi Lavy, Chris, C-print, 24 x 24 inches

Portraiture continues to find new ways to reinvent itself. Adi Lavy’s Chris, has a shocking array of freckled and mottled red skin on his round, youthful face–not the keepsake picture mom puts on the piano. I couldn’t be certain if I was looking at something beautiful or something embarrassing. Either way, the vulnerability of the subject raises questions about what it takes to be a man. Jessica Roberts‘ Before the Coming, Brian, (I had admired this picture in the L’Autre photography exhibit at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery) also takes advantage of youth to question the stereotypes of manhood. Kate Anderson’s Protector explores how a coiuple of boys perceive and practice their roles as men.

Paul Weiner, Klean, Cibachrome, 16 x 16 inches

The archest photo in the show was staged, with what looked like some digital collaging and manipulation. Klean, by Paul Weiner, is a faux set-up and a send-up of commercials for cleaning agents. Other staged photos were anything but arch.

The show had a large number of black and white photographs and old-fashioned images, lots of street photos, lots of portraits, lots of the-way-we-live photos, lots of the way-we-used-to-live and the way-we-used-to-shoot photographs. But the show’s strong suit were the photographs off the imagery grid. I was totally interested in the photos that present a different cultural self-awareness from the images that assault us on a daily basis. Plus it was great to look at the mix of what people are madly photographing!