Andrea Modica

Equine surgery and medical observation; specialized labor and industrial production. In its study of the Clinica Equina Bagnarola, a renowned horse clinic outside of Bologna, Italy, Andrea Modica’s Theatrum Equorum (TIS books, 2022) touches on each of these subjects fluidly and with considerable grace, in a mode closer to aphorism than to essay. Modica’s images are luminous and rich with detail, and the manner in which they show us the anesthetized horses and surgical equipment – both before and after use – is formal and composed, distanced but not quite detached. We are offered a rare view inside an otherwise niche and hermetic world, and the structure of observation in these pictures is one that borrows from the strain of forensic photography found within the documentary style more broadly, where the controlled conditions of a studio-like setup provide a consistent setting. Modica pairs these composed studies with equally composed scenes of post-operative disarray, and with quiet, almost reverential ones of horses in recovery.

Modica made this work over the span of eight years, working with her 8×10 inch view camera under conditions seemingly at odds with the preparation time typically needed to use it: “When I was photographing the horses, I would set up the 8×10 camera, and it would take me a while to get the movements in place, considering the angles of the box. I was allowed to stay and photograph the horse until it started waking up, indicated by the slightest twitch of an eye or ear. Sometimes this would take just a few minutes but never more than 15. At that point the anesthesiologist would slam the doors closed.” She concluded that the 8×10 was exactly the wrong camera to use for a project like this, where speed and ease of adjustability would typically be paramount. Looking at the pictures she made, though, it is clear that whatever she may have lost in terms of convenience was more than made up for in the gravitas, or sheer presence, that the pictures have. While the 8×10 may have been cumbersome or restrictive in this context, it allowed Modica to impart what seems to me as a kind of density, or heaviness, of time, to pictures made under circumstances where the allowance of time was at a premium – where a delay or mistake could mean one’s access is gone or, perhaps, an operation is impeded upon or obstructed.

Lolita, Show Jumper, Palmar Digital Neurectomy / ©Andrea Modica

Though surgery is the obvious subject of this book, we are introduced to and made aware of it somewhat obliquely. The cover image puts us at eye-level with a tray of neatly arranged surgical instruments ready for use, and while this is clear and descriptive, once we open the book and begin its sequence, what we see is a bundle of instruments obscured from view and still packaged, their purpose not yet known. Likewise, the images of sleeping horses that follow stop short of clearly communicating the procedures that have just been performed on them. The patience and restraint the sequencing has for showing us the graphic mess of surgery that comes soon enough is deft: rather than attune our senses to what may shock or repel us, we focus instead on the rich glow of light that suffuses the simple yet precise surgical tools, making them seem strange and even embodied; or, we look upon the horses with a kind of bemused wonderment rather than agitated concern. Put differently, because the sequence effectively slow-plays the display of bones, cartilage, bloody tools and all the rest, we have time to become sensitive to the materiality of this world, and to do so in a way not encumbered by our potential squeamishness.

Hair, steel, cloth, wire, paper and blood. These textures define the pictures and how the sequence unfolds: sleeping horses and studies of surgical tools gradually give way to a more explicit reality, where those same tools are shown strewn about and tangled together in a post-operative heap, and where horses begin to show more visible signs of the surgical procedures visited upon them in the form of sutures, casts and bandages. The cool and contemplative tone that characterizes the beginning of the book is replaced by an almost frantic one, as the aftermath of surgery starts to take hold of the sequence. In the midst of this we are routinely brought back to those studies of surgical tools that now contrast sharply with our new understanding of how they are actually used, and which have, by comparison, the effect of offering us a kind of idealized image of surgery, of the instruments needed for it, and of the precision with which they are manufactured. They appear to us not so much as practical tools within an industrial and medicinal context, but as light and shape – as pure form.

Where the sequence seems to stumble, if only slightly, is when pictures of phantoms are introduced in the last quarter or so of the book. These are devices used in horse breeding for wealthy and high profile clients, where “A female horse in heat is brought into the space with the phantom, where she will spray. Then she is put in a safe location behind a low wall, still in sight but out of reach, and a male horse is brought in and guided to mount the phantom. The sperm is collected and sold.” These images are, unsurprisingly, beautiful to behold. They also seem somewhat out of place: gone is the theater of surgery and in its place is something strange and even more remote. There are no captions to guide us through the book (those are saved for an index at the very end, which includes exact names of the tools, horses, and procedures) and so when we encounter the phantoms we do so with no real sense for how they relate to the world of surgery we’ve just left. Even with the contextual information provided by the index and by Modica, there is a nagging sense that these pictures don’t advance or expand the sequence that the TIS books team of Nelson Chan and Carl Wooley, along with Modica herself, created.

What may have strengthened the book, I think, is if it showed us the social world of the clinic, the kind that the penultimate image gestures toward: a portrait of a surgeon having just finished an emergency colic surgery, her gloves and surgical gown covered in blood. Modica may have been unable to gain access to, or secure the participation of, more surgeons, the clinic’s administrative staff, or even the horse owners themselves. In spite of that, her pictures still imply, at the very least, their existence as the absent cause of what we see, and so it should come as no surprise that we might desire more of their presence, if only to complicate this world, or to make it seem fuller and more complex than it already appears to be.