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 – at times to teach photography, or for a relationship, and always to make photographs with no real agenda, just being in the moment. 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 8x10 camera.
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 8x10 inch negatives – a lot bigger than the tiny negatives from 35mm cameras. The large format meant I couldn’t photograph a horse galloping across a field.
In my work everybody knows they’re 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 – that’s 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. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
