where someone is whispering to you, but you can’t quite make out the words.
Andrea lives and works in Philadelphia, teaches at Drexel University. She shoots with a large format 8×10 camera and prints using platinum/palladium process — one of the most meticulous and refined techniques in analog photography.
While this particular series focuses on Pennsylvania, much of her work was created in different parts of Italy, New York, and across the United States. Just look at them!
The impression her work leaves is intense. Often, when looking at her photographs, your heart freezes a little. Sometimes, for no clear reason, you start to feel anxious or scared. Sometimes you’re not even sure if the people in the photos are alive.
The photos are incredibly intimate — but not in a cozy way. It’s a closeness that feels anatomical, like you’re being pulled inside the image. You feel like you can smell the room where the photo was taken.
There’s something existential in her photography — something that burns like a bright light straight into your eyes, and you’re not sure whether you want to turn away or squint.
And sometimes, in these images, it’s like you get to see yourself from an angle no mirror could ever show you, and no photo session could ever capture.
She’s really good at creating a central point in each frame, around which a whole story unfolds.
If her photos were a different kind of art, they’d probably be a dramatic immersive performance — one that pulls you into a strange dream, where someone is whispering to you, but you can’t quite make out the words.
We could go on praising the photographer, but honestly, it feels like only a tiny percentage of people ever manage to sink that deep into someone else’s private life — to exist outside of context, and therefore outside of time, and become something you can’t quite place — whether it happened 3 years ago or 30.
