Andrea Modica on her best photograph: a blood-splattered surgeon after emergency horse surgery

Photographer Andrea Modica has shared the story behind one of her best-known images, a portrait of a veterinary surgeon captured immediately after an emergency operation on a horse at a hospital near Bologna, Italy.

Modica traces her connection to Italy back to her family heritage and to a trip she took there in her twenties, shortly after her first professional job in the 1980s. That visit began four decades of returning to the country, sometimes to teach photography, sometimes for personal reasons, and always to continue making photographs without a fixed agenda.

A large-format portrait

The photograph in question was taken roughly six years ago at a horse hospital outside Bologna, a location that became the subject of an extensive body of work for Modica. She photographed the site using an old-style large-format 8x10 camera, a technique that produces highly detailed images but requires a slower, more deliberate approach to shooting.

Describing the surgeon in the image, Modica said she found the subject striking, later realizing the woman's blood-splattered appearance after the emergency procedure evoked the image of a medieval statue or a Madonna figure, a comparison she did not anticipate until reviewing the photograph.

The image forms part of a new book and an accompanying exhibition drawing on Modica's many years photographing at the horse hospital, an extension of her long-running project documenting the site under the Latin title Theatrum Equorum, meaning "Horse Theatre."