An American Photographer's Italian Madonna, and the Statue the Camera Found

The Guardian's 'My best photograph' series has turned to Andrea Modica, whose chosen image shows a blood-splattered surgeon after an emergency operation on a horse. In her account, the photographer says you would have to be out of your mind not to want to photograph this woman, and that only afterwards did she notice the surgeon resembled a medieval statue, a madonna.

The Italian thread in the piece is biographical and explicit. Modica tells the Guardian that after her first job in the 1980s she took a little money, a camera and a backpack and set off for Italy, having grown up hearing about the country. That is a familiar formation story in American photography, and it matters here because the comparison she reaches for is not a painterly one but a sculptural and devotional one.

The series is a foreign outlet asking a photographer to explain her own work, which is why it is worth reading in Italy rather than only about it. The madonna comparison is Modica's, offered after the fact, and it places an image of a veterinary emergency in a line that runs back through Italian churches and their carved figures. The Guardian published it; the reading of Italy inside it belongs to the photographer.