A Horse Surgeon, a Bloodied Gown, and an Italy the Camera Found

The Guardian's long-running "My best photograph" series turned this week to Andrea Modica, whose chosen image shows a blood-splattered surgeon standing after an emergency operation on a horse. The photographer told the paper that the woman's face, only fully registered afterwards, put her in mind of a medieval statue, a madonna. The series invites photographers to explain a single frame; Modica's account, as the Guardian published it, is as much about a way of looking as about the picture itself.

The same account reaches back to the start of her career. After her first job in the 1980s, Modica told the Guardian, she had a little money and set off for Italy with a camera and a backpack, having grown up hearing about the country. The Italian journey is the antecedent the paper prints: the place where the habit of noticing was formed, later applied to a surgical scene far from it.

For readers of Italian culture from outside, the interest is in what the photographer does with Italy rather than what Italy does to the photograph. The comparison she draws is art-historical, not touristic — a Renaissance or medieval reference carried into a veterinary emergency. That is a familiar move in the foreign reception of Italian imagery: the country supplies a vocabulary of faces, gestures and light that travelling photographers borrow and then relocate.