While a photography student at Yale, Modica visited her old school and found the captivating subject she’d been looking for: teens whose big hair, eyeliner and rolled-up skirts still radiate personality decades later

In the afterword to her new book Catholic Girl, which documents teenagers at Catholic girls’ schools in New York and New Haven in the mid-1980s, the photographer Andrea Modica likens the experience of initiating the project to a first kiss. “You’re mad about the subject,” she says, “and there’s something about the first time it happens that is slightly out of control and magical and addictive.”

Today Modica is a professor of photography with a career spanning four decades – she’s known for her luminous black-and-white portraiture using large-format cameras and platinum printing – but back then, in her second year of graduate studies at Yale’s school of art, she was struggling to find her voice. “All those months of trying were [leading to] the most dreadful pictures,” she recalls over Zoom from Philadelphia, where she lives and works. “They were well put together, the form was there, but the necessity, the connection with the subject, was not.”