by In the afterword of his new book Catholic girlwhich documents teenagers in Catholic schools for girls in New York and New Haven in the mid-1980s, photographer Andrea Modica imagines the experience of project initiation and first kiss. “You’re mad about the stuff,” she says, “and there’s something about the first time it happens that’s a little out of control and magical and addictive.”
Today Modica has been a professor of photography for four decades – known for her luminous black-and-white portraiture using large-format cameras and platinum printing – but back then, in her second year of study graduate school at Yale art school. , she struggled to find her voice. “It was all those months of effort [leading to] the worst pictures,” she recalls over Zoom from Philadelphia, where she lives and works. “They were well put together, the form was there, but the need, the connection to the content, was not.”
On a snowy day in March 1984, while visiting home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, she dropped by her old high school to meet her beloved art teacher Len Bellinger and asked on a whim if she could photograph him. some of his students. “I didn’t think I’d be able to, but he dropped a few girls out of class and I took some pictures.”
Immediately she knew she was onto something. Despite all the girls wearing the same outfits, their personalities radiated out of the frame, as did their fashion sensibilities.
“It’s at the confluence of disco and punk,” Modica recalls of the era. “It was where Bay Ridge was Saturday Night Fever film when I was at school, so the disco was very important in that neighborhood – and seven years later it’s still going on.” She points to one girl standing against a wall with her hands clasped below her waist, rolling on her ankles. “She still has a Farrah Fawcett haircut. She has an ankle bracelet on a chain around her neck, which symbolizes that she has a boyfriend. She has her skirt rolled up so she’s showing off her legs.”
Other girls reveal a more in-your-face punk attitude. Black eyeliner abounds, as do leather jackets, piercings and quiffs. “They look tough, but also a little quaint,” says Modica. One girl is photographed during a day without her school uniform and she is making the most of it, but, as Modica says, “she is wearing not one medal, not two, but three religious medals. So despite all this hair and wild hair, there’s still this sense of a comfort zone – you have to have something religious when you go to school.”
As much as Modica considers the series 40 years later to be “a bit of a time capsule of music and fashion”, religion is also a key element, albeit less prominently. Who were the punk fashion gestures responding to as opposed to the conformity of their Catholic upbringing? According to Modica, however, her high school was unusually liberal. “We had radical young nuns teaching us. In religion classes they would say: ‘We don’t believe in abortion or premarital sex [but] what do you think?’ We were given a voice and we had to support what we had in mind.”
That openness is evident in her subjects, who demanded to be photographed after taking the first portraits in March 1984. “I don’t know if some girls came because they wanted to get out of the class for 10 minutes, or was. it was a curiosity, but no one did it unfairly.” Modica was shooting with a large format 8×10 camera, which meant the portraits took longer, and because of that “one could argue there’s a certain amount of collaboration involved”, she says. Some girls would change their things. Often, friends would be on the fence at the end inside the frame.
Although Modica did not publish the series at the time, she describes it as a catalyst for future projects, including one called l’Amico del’Cuoreexploring the dynamics between best friends. His interest in uniforms continued in his 1993 monograph Miniature Seriesrepresenting New York baseball players. “They were really proud of the uniform,” she says. “They had much stricter rules about them than the girls.”
When Modica dug up the high school photos during the lockdown and decided to turn them into a book, she was surprised to find that four decades later, many of them still had the prints she sent them at the time. the girls she contacted. Getting back in touch was “a lot of fun”, she says. “One woman came to a signing I was doing, and oh my goodness. In the photo from 40 years [above, wearing glasses] since then she has been very shy and reserved, but now she has blossomed into this lively woman, an art teacher. It was a blast.”
As a teacher herself, Modica has learned to step aside whenever she sees her photography students getting close to a subject – their own first artistic kisses. “The first time it happens to someone is like any other time,” she says. “The technique may not be as good as it will be in 10 years, but the thing is, whatever they’re driving, the technique is causing it, not the other way around.”
It was that cold spring day in 1984 when it happened to Modica and those girls with their big hairstyles and aging leather jackets have influenced her work ever since.
