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.

The Guardian feature is built around a single frame and a first-person explanation of how it came to be. Modica describes the circumstances of the horse operation and the surgeon at its centre, and the phrase she uses — that you would have to be out of your mind not to want to photograph this woman — is a statement about compulsion rather than composition. Photographers in this series are usually asked to justify a choice, and hers is that the subject left no alternative.

The Italian passage is the part of the account that will interest readers here. Modica says that after her first job in the 1980s she had a little money and set off for Italy with her camera and a backpack, and that she had grown up hearing about the country. This is the classic American photographic pilgrimage, and its effect is often less about the pictures taken on the trip than about the visual vocabulary the photographer carries afterwards.

That vocabulary surfaces in the comparison she makes. Looking back at the image, Modica says she realised the surgeon looks like a medieval statue, a madonna. The reference is to carved and painted devotional figures, and it does something specific: it takes a contemporary scene of veterinary labour and reads it through an iconographic tradition that is overwhelmingly Italian. Whether the resemblance is formal or emotional is left open, and the Guardian presents it as the photographer's own retrospective reading.

For Italian readers the interest is comparative. Italy is used constantly as a backdrop in foreign photography, and rather less often as a grammar. Here the country appears twice — once as a place a young photographer went with a backpack, and once as the shape a face takes when it is looked at closely. The Guardian supplies the frame; the photographer supplies the Italy.