After my first job in the 80s, I had a little money and set off for Italy with my camera and a backpack. I had grown up hearing about Italy, where my family is from, and so began 40 years of travelling back and forth \u2013 at times to teach photography, or for a relationship, and always to make photographs with no real agenda, just being in the moment.<\/p>\n
My new book and the show that this image appears in spans my many visits. It was taken about six years ago. I became very interested in a horse hospital outside Bologna. I made a large body of work there and this first appeared in a book called Theatrum Equorum, Latin for Horse Theatre, all caught on an old-style large-format 8×10 camera.<\/p>\n
I photographed horses that had been taken out of surgery, and put into these wonderful recovery boxes filled with shredded paper and beautiful light. To give you a sense of the size of the camera, it takes 8×10 inch negatives \u2013 a lot bigger than the tiny negatives from 35mm cameras. The large format meant I couldn\u2019t photograph a horse galloping across a field.<\/p>\n
double quotation markEveryone in my work is posing \u2013 but hopefully not appearing to be posing. That is where the skill comes in<\/p>\n
In my work everybody knows they\u2019re being photographed. They are reacting to me and the camera, and in a sense posing, but hopefully not appearing to be posing, which is where my skill comes in. With the horses in recovery, I had a few minutes before they came to. I also made pictures of the surgical tools, before and after surgery. Then I focused on the devices that stud horses mount to have sperm collected \u2013 that\u2019s big business. The device is a stand-in for a female horse, but first the male smells an actual horse which they keep in heat for 365 days a year. Then there were some one-off images, and this is one of them.<\/p>\n
Two people operated there: a head surgeon (the owner), and this woman, who I liked very much and connected with. In this image, she had just done emergency surgery on a horse with an obstruction in its gastrointestinal tract. The floor was covered in blood and the contents of the intestines. Many of the procedures I photographed were keyhole surgeries and the tools were very tidy, whereas this was really dramatic.<\/p>\n
She came out of surgery looking like this. I asked if I could make her portrait \u2013 you\u2019d have to be out of your mind not to want to photograph this incredible woman. We went outside into the shade where I knew the detail would show in all its glory, as opposed to in the sun.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t do it on purpose, but I like that her feet are covered so she looks like a column, and I think her hands resemble those I often saw on medieval wooden statues of saints and madonnas. This was all very unconscious, but I could see after that she looks like a statue, and I also think a very beautiful and very powerful woman. I like the picture for so many reasons that maybe somebody else wouldn\u2019t consciously notice. But photographs can work on viewers without them knowing why.<\/p>\n