Andrea Modica never looks at the world straight on.
Instead, she seems to catch glimpses through a keyhole or around a corner, never afraid to let shadows and ambiguity linger.
In her enigmatic, exquisitely realized photographs, the facts are often obscured, but the truth in all its subtle complexities manages to quietly reveal itself.
Twenty-four images spanning the breadth of her “Fountain” series are showcased in a small but visually and emotionally potent exhibition on view through Jan. 10 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
The show only reinforces an already strong case for counting Modica, who resided in Manitou Springs from 1998 through 2006, among the 10 most important photographers to live and work in Colorado in the past half-century — and perhaps ever.
Her images are regularly included in major exhibitions internationally, and they can be found in more than 40 public collections, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
But more important than her impressive resume is the innate power of the probing, hauntingly beautiful images themselves.
The two dozen selections in this show were taken from 2000 through 2006 in Fountain, a town of about 15,000 on the southeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs.
Modica wanted to photograph a slaughterhouse (“I eat and enjoy meat, and I wanted to see how it got to my plate,” she said). After being turned away from several such enterprises, she heard about Dwane Baker.
He runs a small, backyard slaught- erhouse, which is open only on the weekends. When Modica met him, Baker had a full-time job during the week, but he has since retired and devoted himself to the business, which has been in his family for three generations.
She photographed the animals outside at first and then moved into the slaughterhouse. But as she gradually befriended Baker and his wife, Cindy, and their family, they became her chief focus.
In that way, these images take up where her most famous series, “Treadwell,” left off. In that defining body of work, Modica photographed a rural family in upstate New York with 14 children, becoming especially close to Barbara, a pudgy girl who had a natural affinity for the camera.
Modica continued to photograph Barbara after she left New York, and the collaboration ended only in 2001 when Barbara died of complications of diabetes at age 22.
As she did with “Treadwell,” Modica mediates between fiction and nonfiction in this series. While the people and the settings are real, these are in no way documentary images that systematically lay out the Bakers’ lives.
The bulkiness of the photographer’s modern version of an old-fashioned 8-by-10-inch tripod camera and the set-up time it requires does not allow her to be an inconspicuous voyeur, nor is that her intent.
Instead, she becomes an active participant in this milieu, carefully posing the images, such as one from 2005 (they are all simply titled “Fountain Colorado”). In it, one of the children leans backward, her hair cascading over the side of a mattress as a cupped hand from outside the frame appears to catch the strands.
In the subtle poetry of these interactions, a narrative takes form — an intimate, closed-in one suffused with mystery. We see just bits and pieces, and yet somehow the essence of this family and their world is revealed.
Perhaps because of the obvious trust that Modica gained with the Bakers and their willingness to be active collaborators in these works, the scenes never feel forced or artificial. Instead, a kind of authentic truth emerges.
Some of the most complex images were taken in the basement of the Bakers’ house, an unfinished space with just one window and sheets of clear plastic providing insulation.
Breaking from her usual practice of using only available light, she employed two or three clamp-on lights in these scenes, using the plastic as backdrops. In one from 2005, a nearly invisible figure lies on a bed in near darkness, with eerily backlit sheets of plastic looming behind her.
Other images are simpler yet no less compelling, such as one from 2000 in which the camera peers through checkered wire fencing of a pen at a sheep sitting serenely on the ground, as a hand reaches curiously in from one side.
Enhancing this and all of Modica’s images is the extraordinary level of detail she is able to capture with her large-format camera — the deep, puffy folds of the sheep’s heavy wool and the uneven texture of the dirt mixed with bits of straw.
All the selections are platinum/palladium prints. This venerable technique invests these images with a soft depth and humanness that feels rarer and more valuable than ever in a world dominated by everything digital.
Modica now makes her home in Philadelphia, but her impact on Colorado photography will live on.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
