JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the smaller project gallery. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022. Print sizes range from roughly 20×30 to 42×63 inches (or the reverse), and the prints are variously available in editions of 5+2AP, 6+2AP, and 7+2AP. The installation also includes one black-and-white image printed on vinyl and affixed directly to the wall (not included in the checklist). (Installation shots below.)
Comments/Context: One of the clear byproducts of widespread social media use is the cultural phenomenon of constantly performing, particularly in ways that can be photographed and then shared with the world, creating a sense that life didn’t actually happen unless it was visually documented and circulated. And along with the inevitable aspirations to something like personal perfection and the ongoing comparisons to others (both friends and strangers) come a whole series of subtler stresses, anxieties, and identity issues, the psychological impacts of which we haven’t entirely yet understood or internalized. In freely expressing ourselves online, we’ve opened ourselves up to an emotionally draining tumult of attention and criticism (both external and self-inflicted), leading many of us to turn our best face toward the lens with increasing desperation.
The anonymous female subjects in Tania Franco Klein’s photographs all seem to have struggled with this feeling of alienation, leaving them weary, disaffected, and generally alone with their thoughts. Wandering through empty domestic interiors and desert wastes, the figures (most of which are the artist herself, dressed in a variety of wigs and other costumes) hover like restless ghosts, seemingly searching for something they haven’t quite found. The resulting setups are richly cinematic, taking visual cues from both classic film noir and more surreal auteur directors, but reorienting those moods and atmospheres toward something more contemporary in their grounding. Mysteriously vacant and stunted emotions are nothing new in this history of photography and film, and Franco Klein has redirected those haunted aesthetics toward the dark underbelly of our current existence.
Franco Klein’s artistic momentum has slowly been building over the past handful of years. The Mexican photographer first caught our attention with her 2019 photobook Positive Disintegration (reviewed here), and in the years since, she has followed that body of work with two others, “Proceed To The Route” and “Break In Case Of Emergency”, which continue to explore related themes. This succinct show, her first gallery solo in New York, provides a very quick sampler of all three projects in just one small room, providing a serviceable introduction to her photographic ideas. Franco Klein has also been included in MoMA’s forthcoming “New Photography 2025” exhibition, so she will pop up again here in the city next year as well.
To the extent possible in such an intimate space, Franco Klein has created a layered installation, with different sized prints scattered around the walls, in one case, actually overlapping. The three early prints from “Positive Disintegration” all use mediation to frame the self-portrait subject, including a face-on-the-table reflection in the metallic surface of a toaster, a telescoped view of a seated figure in a bedroom as seen on a black-and-white television in the background, and a silhouetted figure behind fogged glass in a bathroom. Franco Klein’s intentional use of saturated color also becomes evident, as tones of yellow, orange, and brown (and their shadows) provide a claustrophobic mood setting palette.
The images from “Proceed To The Route” do just that, largely moving outside to ambiguous road trip locations, including parking lots, airports, and dusty desertscapes. Franco Klein’s photographs capture a muted sense of being lost, while traveling or otherwise, with figures (again mostly camouflaged self-portraits) looking out into the distance, shading their eyes from the sun. In this edit, women stare out into the dusty redness of distant mesas, wander through encroaching shadows, and watch small airplanes take off (or land) with left-behind Hitchcockian dread. Watching takes place in most of the pictures, as if life is happening elsewhere and the subjects are separated from that reality by the dislocating space of movement.
Franco Klein takes that psychological turmoil to its logical endpoint with her “Break In Case Of Emergency” project. The compositions push further toward the surreal, or even the blithely dangerous, with kitchen fires left to burn and various other forms of near self harm attesting to personalities pushed to (and perhaps past) their limits. The one image from the series included here captures a face flipped and distorted by a table mirror, the upside down performance steeped in emotions upended and tensions unreleased.
With each successive project, Franco Klein’s work has gotten more complex and sophisticated, which bodes well for her ongoing artistic development. She has quickly moved beyond straightforward performance to more subtle explorations of setting, mood, and persona, always using misdirection and compositional innovation to amplify her scenes. It seems that she has a nearly endless well of 21st century anxieties and social behaviors to draw from, offering her a rich set of options as she develops her photographic voice further.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $7000 and $16500, based on size and place in the edition. Franco Klein’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
