I’ve know of Andrea Modica’s Treadwell series for sometime, and each time I come back to it I’m equally engrossed. First and foremost, Treadwell is a fictional town she’s created, photographing the children of it in a manner of the Gothic grotesque, and any sort of fiction this elaborated always garners my respect and inspires my imagination. Secondly, she is shooting 8×10 and the prints are platinum, and while I try to avoid letting technical aspects like this influence my viewing of photographs – b/c it’ll often end up weighing in too heavily – recognition still must be made that these are exquisite platinum prints.

photo: Treadwell, NY (1992) ©Andrea Modica

photo: Treadwell, NY (1993) ©Andrea Modica

Now Alessandra Sanguinetti I just discovered, seeing three Fujiflex prints from her series On The Sixth Day at the MOMA. I stared at them longer than any of the other prints there, longer than the Andreas Gursky print, longer than the Philip-Lorca Dicorcia print, longer than the Jeff Wall print, and this is to Sanguinetti’s credit, b/c as far as I know she’s much their junior. The reason for my staring at them so long was b/c I couldn’t figure out what I felt about them (which makes them good right?). There’s something accessible and nearly plain about them; almost like they’re too “pretty” to hang where they hang – but at the same time there is an apparent tension and violence in them that somehow correlates so well in juxtaposition to the simplicity and beauty. Maybe too I found them a relief b/c they seemed not to be reaching so hard for intellectualism as so much contemporary photography is…

This first photo of the goats – I think they’re goats anyhow – I kept coming back to…there’s something in it, something tremendous. If I collected photographs, I would certainly desire it. Thanks so much for it, Alessandra.

photo: Untitled from On The Sixth Day ©Alessandra Sanguinetti

photo: Untitled from On The Sixth Day ©Alessandra Sanguinetti