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The Paris Review

On Tania Franco Klein’s “Our Life in the Shadows”

By Anna Furman 2018

In Tania Franco Klein’s photo series “Our Life in the Shadows”—on display last month at Mexico City’s Material art fair and San Francisco’s Photofairs—women stare blankly at static television screens, mirrored toaster ovens, and hazily lit window curtains. A sense of ennui permeates the images, which depict domestic life in rich cinematic detail. Each subject is cropped so that her face is never fully in view. Often, the women are distorted by a reflection or an obfuscating prop. In The Waiting, one of the fifty images that comprise the series, a bowl of lipstick-marked cigarettes is perched ceremoniously atop a pillow. The living room is saturated with a moody cobalt blue. (Other images are steeped in jewel-toned reds and deep emerald greens.) Unpeopled and static, the photo is, conceivably, a portrait; the alluring mise-en-scène bears only traces of the person out of view.

“My main character is emotions,” says the twenty-seven-year-old Mexico City–based photographer, who treats houses, furniture, and human subjects as vessels for those emotions—which range from anxiety and melancholy to existential stress. On February 23, at San Francisco’s Photofairs, three self-portraits from the series were on view. In the photographs, Franco Klein is topless, gazing out at a mattress-littered desert road; lying on a carpeted floor, facing her muddled reflection; and in a kitchen, keeled over in exhaustion. Anxious and rudderless, her characters are ill at ease in their environments. Though Franco Klein envisions each subject, including herself, in what she calls a “private jungle”—bathroom, sofa, train seat—there is invariably a voyeuristic element at play. By looking or even physically turning away from the camera, Franco Klein’s subjects are almost—but never completely—able to evade our gaze. 

Throughout the series, balding velvet settees and rickety wooden chairs are treated at once like precious objects and ugly, forgotten debris—clever metaphors for how women themselves are paradoxically valued and devalued in domestic spaces as maids, sex workers, housewives, and mothers. Anachronistic details like a princess phone, a clunky television set, and a gas stove from the sixties appear in disorienting scenes that sidestep any one specific era. In their simple costumes and cherry-red lipstick, Franco Klein’s characters evoke a timeless femininity.

If a nuclear family, kempt house, and diligent housewife comprise the American Dream (at least by the standards of the fifties), then Franco Klein’s destruction of nostalgia-inducing furniture signals a refusal to conform to such expectations. Viewed in tandem with photos of discarded mattresses, the image of a couch on fire is stark and conclusive. Mattresses and couches absorb, quite grotesquely, years of their owners’ sweat and dead skin cells, evidencing the passage of time and, with it, our bodies’ gradual, inevitable decay. 

Franco Klein’s obliteration of the couch signals the willful, cathartic end to a painful chapter in her life as much as it does a refusal to cede to gender-specific social pressures. In 2016, after finishing a graduate program at the University of the Arts London, Franco Klein was nomadic, living in new cities every two months. “I lost my sense of home,” she says. Franco Klein became interested in the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration (TPD), which posits that we are at our greatest potential for growth after periods of anxiety, depression, or trauma. (In 2017, at Mexico City’s Zona Maco fair, she named her photo installation “Positive Disintegration.”) Franco Klein was also influenced by Byung-Chul Han’s book The Burnout Society, in which he argues that a fixation on self-improvement is endemic to our postindustrial, digital age and that it leads to an accumulation of stress and exhaustion.

Throughout this series, Franco Klein wears a voluminous, curly wig and retro square-framed glasses, disguising herself, alternately, as a lost heroine, a disgruntled suburbanite, and a troubled party guest. Her characters make languorous gestures and are perpetually on the brink of collapse; their eyes are often concentrated but empty, evidence that they are only half present to the world around them. In a sterile green-lit bathroom—a crime scene, possibly—Franco Klein twists on the floor in pleasure or pain or both, wearing high-waisted nude tights that accentuate her strained muscles. In a diptych, she becomes another character, sandwiched between couch cushions, her body fragmented and trapped by the furniture’s overbearing weight. Her head, hair, and left shoulder are the only parts in view in one frame; only her torso, derriere, and calves are visible in another. These perverse positions exacerbate the mental and emotional gymnastics each character undergoes to reckon with her respective reality. Instead of providing comfort or support, the furniture constricts and even smothers Franco Klein.

Franco Klein finds freedom in her characters’ anonymity and deploys a dreamy color palette to illuminate gradations of depression. Velvety oranges and reds fill one bedroom with a warmth that is at odds with her subject’s blank expression. When she attempts to reconcile a tumultuous inner life with her external environment, it results in the ultimate escape fantasy: to disappear, to live only on screen. On a black-and-white television screen, there is a small, almost spectral figure in view. “The television shows the same scene as the photo,” Franco Klein explains. “In a way, the character disappears from her own reality and is lost in the image of herself.”

Though most of these images are self-portraits, she does occasionally scout subjects—in her grandmother’s apartment building, in seniors’ water-aerobics classes, and on the street. To set up a scene in which an infant lies in a car, Franco Klein scoured cars parked in her neighborhood. After finding a car with the exact color and textured interior that she wanted—”the usual velvet I have in my photos”—Franco Klein left a note for the owner, asking to use his car for her shoot on the following day. He obliged, they scheduled a shoot time, and she borrowed a friend’s baby for the photo. The resulting image is unnerving: a lone diapered baby bathed in a supernatural pinkish light lies faceup in the backseat of a car, unattended. There are no seat belts, car seats, or adults in view, which renders this otherwise ordinary scene exceedingly strange. We are left to wonder: Is the baby crying? Where are its parents? Will it survive? “When we see an abandoned baby, it’s so vulnerable that we quickly want to protect it,” Franco Klein explains. “But we don’t have the same feelings of empathy for someone our own age, when they might need us just as much.” As adults, our physical and emotional needs evolve and deepen; the image conveys that, regardless of age, we are all vulnerable and, in solipsistic terms, ultimately alone. “What permeates all the work is isolation,” Franco Klein says. “A lot of people feel lonely. That’s a huge issue. We’re satisfying our egos but are feeling more lonely than ever.”

For this series, Franco Klein took most of the interior shots in Mexico City, her hometown, and saved exterior shots for trips to Long Beach, California, and small towns around Palm Springs. Because of ongoing violence in Mexico City—kidnappings, assaults, gun violence—Franco Klein is vigilant about her safety when working at home. “In California, I feel so free to take these photos,” she says. “I don’t have the same paranoia.” In “Our Life in the Shadows,” Franco Klein retreats to homelike spaces, perhaps looking for an oasis of comfort and security. Instead, she finds unstable, even volatile environments that are immersive, corrosive, and charged with psychic stress. In delving deep into such fraught emotional states, Franco Klein taps into her own ability to transcend the circumstances to which she’s bound.

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ARTFORUM

Editors s Picks, Exhibition Proceed To The Route at ROSEGALLERY

Annabel Osberg 2020

Popular culture often conflates travel with personal development. But if the lone wanderers in Tania Franco Klein’s photographs were hoping for self-discovery, they appear to have gotten lost in non-places, presumably still in the present day but replete with nostalgic affectations. Franco Klein titled this show “Proceed to the Route,” after the command some GPS applications paradoxically give to users who have strayed off course. Photographs and wallpaper installations from various bodies of work are juxtaposed in unexpected configurations, evoking split-screen disjunctions.

Franco Klein’s stagings are redolent of commercial photography, or perhaps more Hitchcockian and Lynchian film stills, as her subjects’ glamour is matched by their malaise. Although many of the photographs are self-portraits, the artist suppresses her identity—donning wigs and retro fashions, obscuring herself with shadows and props—to make room for the enigmatic, anonymous characters she plays. Many of her poses suggest exhaustion, unconsciousness, even death. In Yellow Tiles (Self-Portrait), 2017, she appears behind a shower door, her face and body blurred by the textured glass as if she were an apparition.

The source of her protagonists’ discomfort is invisible, but motifs of bathrooms, beds, and vintage appliances offer hints. The toaster in Toaster (Self-Portrait), 2016, reflects a woman’s head resting on a table, as though she had collapsed while preparing breakfast. Even as technology progresses, everyday life grows increasingly arduous in a society that devalues individuals while expecting them to perform. Two GIFs shown on old televisions most succinctly encapsulate the feeling of being trapped in an endless loop of ungratifying obligations: In Breathe, 2019, a woman hyperventilates into a paper bag, besieged by a panic attack that never advances yet never retreats.

Los Angeles Times

Review: For Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein, self-portraits come with plenty of shadows

by LEAH OLLMAN 2020

Most of the photographs in Tania Franco Klein’s show at Rose Gallery are self-portraits. She appears unaccompanied, but in a certain sense, she is not entirely alone. Other artists feel present: Jo Ann Callis, Edward Hopper and Cindy Sherman, among them. 

Klein has assimilated an assortment of familiar aesthetic stances — retro styling, cinematic staging, the still as narrative spur — as well as now-common tropes relating to female isolation, longing and the elusive definition of identity. She builds on these foundations and tweaks the recipes just enough to give her work its own piquant flavor.

One of the most striking examples is a large black-and-white image of Klein seen from behind, in just pants and bra on a scrubby field, her body leaning forward toward a small plane in the near distance. It’s a scene of vague desperation and urgency. 

The woman Klein plays is a changing character more than a stable self, and the frequent references to transit imply that she is moving or wanting to move toward something different, perhaps better. In domestic settings, she appears in a state of deep interiority, looking at a screen, out a window or at her own reflection, as if imagining herself elsewhere.

Klein works mostly in color, extracting rich gem tones from the saturated hues of afternoon light on her settings or sets. In an impeccably composed picture from inside a train, emerald pleated curtains open to a dusty, ocher expanse. The upholstered seats, aglow, match the green of the curtains and are flecked with the same gold of the distant view.

“Dining Room (Self-portrait)” offers a beautiful, moody study in primaries. Klein, in pale yellow, curls up on the sea-green carpet between a chair with red cushion and the blue blankness of a TV screen. The nicked corner of the wooden chair leg reads like a bruised knee, a subtle detail further texturing the inferred story.

Klein, who lives in Mexico City and L.A., installs her pictures with an eye toward reinforcing the sense of destabilization within them. She prints in a variety of sizes, overlaps framed atop unframed photographs, hangs framed pieces in offset pairings and mounts pictures in a diverse range of heights on the wall. The strategy is something of an affectation, but it does put the body on notice when experiencing the show — the Mexican artist’s first in the U.S. — and makes it that much more involving.

The Gorgeous Hitchhike

By Alex Nicholson 2022 (Winter Issue)

There are different ways of being lost, and intention might be what makes all the difference. Often, when you say you're lost, Tania Franco Klein tells me, "You’re actually feeling other things. You're not actually lost. Maybe you’re feeling isolated, frustrated, anxious; that feeling comes from different places." In her work, the Mexico City-based photographer searches out such places. She outlines a universe where they might live, begins to color it in, and during the process, finds she has arrived at some sort of destination. Being lost is sometimes the best way to find where you are going. “There's something comforting about the acknowledgment of it," agrees Franco Klein, "knowing you’re going somewhere, even if you don't know where." 

When drawn to a particular theme, Franco Klein digs deep and conceptualizes a psychological universe she can physically explore, trusting that instinct is ready to lead the rest of the way; only then does she pick up a camera and allow her unconscious mind to take over. "You just feel it or you don’t. The more I leave to the performance of the moment, the more comes to life." Our emotions and experiences frame how we see the world. The power of a photograph is its ability to transmit a piece of that unique, subjective experience. Finding a balance between calculation and improvisation, reason and intuition, Franco Klein reacts to a world of her own construction. These dualities shape how Franco Klein makes photographs and, ultimately, initiate us into a similar process of self-reflection. The nostalgic, cinematic quality of her work begs for an expository narrative, yet, she embraces contradiction, resisting the impulse to craft a narrative, often actively working to obscure one. "There's no beginning and no end,” she says. "This is a world that exists all at the same time." We are left to absorb the images viscerally, as they exist, at that moment. And isn't that what a good story does anyway, offers us images through which to imagine our lives?

Burned by the modern pressures of the American Dream, the figures in her series Our Life in the Shadows lay in shock, exhausted, and overstimulated. In her subsequent project, Proceed to the Route, the figures eye ways of escape, yet remain trapped in states of uncertainty, “having access to the knowledge to go anywhere," writes Franco Klein, "but still knowing nothing." The pandemic put a pause to the work, and perhaps the characters were left in a similar position as the rest of us: forced to look a little more closely at the route we’re traveling. Where are we and where do we go from here? "I suddenly have this thirst for very explosive things," Franco Klein hinted to me about her new work. "I don’t know, maybe a lot of people feel that way right now. I've felt so much death. It’s almost like it’s a grieving period in history right now and I just want to feel alive, you know? And what is it that makes us feel alive?

PUBLISHER’S EYE: Tania Franco Klein

Exhibition Review 2023

Alex Garner

Disorienting and mysterious, the stunning works of Tania Franco Klein—both her photographs and her exhibition design—are studies in tension, space and texture. Her photographs of female subjects in mostly domestic settings are suspenseful and cinematic: a woman walks away from a stove with a pan on fire, another sits in a bathtub of water wearing a bra and skirt, about to poke her eye with a metal fork. Alluding to the feeling of being trapped in the home, these photos touch on loneliness and self-destruction while looking at the environments in a new way (in some of them, it’s hard to tell where the photo was taken), and the gallery is similarly transformed. Golden streamers cover several of the walls, highlighting the warmth in many of her images, while the photos vary in size and placement, some overlapping or ascending the walls. The overall effect is moving, both beautiful and uncomfortable, slightly surreal, making the familiar strange.

i-D VICE

The american dream through the lens of a young mexican photographer

By Benoit Loiseau 2018

The photography of Tania Franco-Klein evokes a sense of tragicomedy worthy of Samuel Beckett — only this time, Godot may well show up and offer you a job at his tech startup. With elaborate sets and scenic colour contrasts, the Mexican photographer constructs enigmatic scenes where existential angst converses with the implied decline of Western society, often with a good dose of satire. “All my work is about social behaviour and solitude,” a surprisingly upbeat, 27-year-old tells me when we meet at a local canteen in the Roma Sur district of her native Mexico City. “Technology is supposed to bring us together, but instead it’s taking us apart.”

The young photographer is in the spotlight this month with a display at Photofairs San Francisco, with her gallery Almanaque, featuring pictures from her latest series, Our Lives in the Shadows. Shot over the past two years between Mexico and California, the introspective works (which will also be released as a book later this year) are dominated by self-portraiture involving nudity and wigs and a biting commentary on the poorly-ageing ideals of the American dream. “It’s an autobiographical project, it’s very personal,” explains the artist, who had previously worked with a variety of models of all ages and paths of life (generally strangers). “I used it as therapy,” she confesses.

Set in motels and desert landscapes, the works speak to a sense of dislocation between the domestic and the natural world. Meanwhile, the presence of props — from vintage landline telephones and old hoovers to chunky 80s glasses — suggests an element of nostalgia for a paradise lost, wrecked by the neoliberal turn and the digital age. 

“Our idea of success is so rooted in Western ideologies,” affirms Tania as she references the influential 2015-book The Burnout Society, in which the Korean-born, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the excessive positivity which characterises the age we live in has produced a spreading malaise. “Everyone on social media is constantly performing themselves,” continues the photographer, “there’s a huge problem with loneliness.”

And loneliness, indeed, is at the core of the series. In one picture, an old landline telephone is sitting on a blue-leather cushion stool by a large glass ashtray, filled with lipstick-stained cigarettes butts, denoting a long-awaiting phone call that clearly never arrived. In another picture, the photographer is seen passed out on a wooden kitchen surface, her face reflecting in an old-fashioned chrome toaster, camouflaged in a toupee and glasses, dreaming of another reality.

Her 2015 series Pest Control, in contrast, favours comical, multi-protagonist narratives. Taking inspiration from the concept of non-places (as coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, to describe spaces of transience like airports and shopping malls), the photographer has imagined a society in which pigeon spikes have cropped up all over the public sphere, as a kind of avoidance device for social ills. They adorn our shoes, furniture, train seats: pointing to collective hysteria while nodding at the growing trend in hostile urban design (which generally aims to restrict access to public spaces for the homeless).

Meanwhile, the ongoing series Fun Fair introduces a particular surrealist aesthetic, enabled by green-screen technology. The photographer documented some of the wildest attractions at amusement parks around London and, using digital retouching, altered what would otherwise be quotidian scenes into an epic spectacle in which fair-goers’ shoes are flying over a pastel-blue sky, reminiscent of a Magritte painting. Here, the depiction of the accidental, in its most trivial form, seems to reveal the cracks in the system of our overachieving, entertainment-obsessed society. 

But the camera wasn’t Tania’s first choice. Before studying Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion, she’d trained to be an architect and briefly worked with the leading Mexican architect Michel Rojkind. “Something was missing,” she says of her former profession, explaining that her interests always lied in the emotional sphere. “But the act of taking a picture, for me, is the last part of the work,” she continues, pointing to her sophisticated mises-en-scène, which reveal a sophisticated spatial awareness.

And it’s not just the carefully-composed sets that make up the theatricality in Tania’s work, it’s also the props — more precisely, her large collection of wigs. Similarly to Cindy Sherman (who Tania cites as an inspiration, alongside Martin Parr and Jimmy De Sana) the Mexican photographer’s self-portraits present an element of role play, aided by cheap hairpieces and other second-hand accessories. “It has come to a point where I talk about my own characters in the third person, as if they were real people!” she laughs, suggesting that she may well be as neurotic as the subjects in her work.

“For me, it’s when I don’t give in to these emotions that I win,” says the artist, reflecting on her struggle with the absurdist nature of late capitalism, which fuels her art with both lyricism and wit. “It’s not about photography,” she muses, “it’s about life.”

Proceed To The Route

Exhibition Text 2019. Brendan Embser Managing Editor Aperture Foundation

The color is red and the woman is ready. The color is blue and the phone is ringing. The American Dream is a fiction and so are these photographs by Tania Franco Klein. 

“My main character is emotion” she says. But her subjects, the women Franco Klein builds into character studies, like figures in film stills, seem beyond emotion. They have seen too much. They see too much. They are ready for a change, to press beyond the sheath of solitude, to make the most of their time, which is all the time they have left. When they are not performing, they are not visible. And when they are not visible, the sun is setting.

In her recent photographs, Franco Klein appears to take up the mantle of the masters: the archetypes of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills and the Hollywood lighting of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hustlers, the shocking colors of William Eggleston and the mysterious, glossy poses of Jimmy DeSana. 

Like a film-noir alchemist, Franco Klein combines the erotic and the enigmatic, setting her retro scenes of anxious road trips and glamorous hangovers against the psychological grain of the present: the stress of our digital age; the stress of performing.

“I lost my sense of home,” Franco Klein says of her life lived between Mexico City, California and London. That loss is expressed in these photographs as a search, by both artist and subject, woman alone and women as some imagined collective. 

Burned out, on the road again, or just waiting with a cigarette and the half-life of a dream, in the brilliant, gem-tone saturation of colored light, her women are lost in the world but found in images. We are all in this together, Franco-Klein seems to say to them, from behind the lens. Even if we are all alone.

British Journal of Photography

The Female Gaze issue

by Izabela Radwanska 2017

We are living in a world where we are more connected than ever and yet we can still be left feeling completely alone. In his book, The Burnout Society, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han explores this, and the idea that the overload of modern technology and the “culture of convenience” are catalysts for depression and various personality disorders. Drawing inspiration from his theories, Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein places this contradiction at the centre of her ongoing autobiographical project, Our Life in the Shadows, which also explores the pursuit of the American Dream and facets of perfection. “We have these compulsions to perform and we live in a society of achievement and positivity that has led to a constant fatigue,” she says.

The need to escape from media overstimulation is seen through the eyes of fictional female characters placed in vulnerable, hunched positions, shot in different rooms of a 1970s-style house. They smoke cigarettes, stare at the television and lie on the floor. Some were cast from the street, with Franco Klein particularly looking for individuals “trying to be invisible and avoid any attention from the crowd”, but most are self-modelled.

Her clever use of bold, dramatic colour blocking, which engulfs each image in a separate tone, serves as a contrast to their introverted behaviour. “Emotions are the most important for my work. If you can connect through emotions and the experience of the visual, sometimes it opens up the door to imagine smells and sounds and a whole 4D experience.” She adds: “It’s funny because I’m talking about isolation, but at the same time I realise that doing self-portraits isolated me more.”

The photographer pays meticulous attention to the spaces used as backdrops for the sensitivity she seeks to communicate. She finds specific rooms and locations by knocking on neighbours’ doors, and constructs her own sets and props – often entirely from scratch. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that she came to photography through architecture, which she studied in Mexico before moving to London to do an MA in fashion photography at the University of the Arts London in 2014.

Crucially, although relatable, her narrative carries an ambiguity, which encourages the viewer to apply their own story and interpretation, and hopefully think about our modern-day dual identities. “We are always trying to create identities with social media to express the good part of ourselves, as if there is some kind of shame in knowing what we are on the other side... because we feel that we have failed in what we are supposed to be.”

The Washington Post

‘Our life in the shadows,’ surreal photos that mirror our fractured times

Perspective by Troy Witcher and Tania Franco Klein 2021

Loneliness, usually followed by the dark cloud of depression, can take an immeasurable toll on us mentally and physically, causing myriad problems including persistent sadness, fatigue, loss of appetite, not to mention body aches. Collectively, the imagery of “Our Life in the Shadows” by photographer Tania Franco Klein serves as an allegory to this melancholia.

When asked about the inspiration behind her project, Klein told In Sight:

“The series is influenced by the pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ lifestyle and contemporary practices such as leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, eternal — and the psychological sequels they generate in our everyday private life. The project seeks to evoke a mood of isolation, depression, vanishing and anxiety through fragmented images, that exist both in a fictional and realistic way.

“I think the emotions that I depict in my work are usually the ones that are deemed as negative, but nonetheless emotions that we are all familiar with and experience alone. I think that we all drift between the duality of emotions of what we are experiencing and what we transmit to the world. I also try to explore topics that I feel are not usually talked about because I think there is an obsession with positivity and no space to learn to cope with anything that might threaten what that implies.

“The characters in my photographs have the constant need to escape, to always look outside. My characters find themselves almost anonymous, melting in places, vanishing into them, constantly lacking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate and exhausted constantly in an odd line between trying and feeling defeated.

“Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. We have left behind the immunological era, and now experience the neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome, and bipolar disorder.”
All of this is vividly born out in the images in “Our Life in the Shadows” through Klein’s brooding, surreal approach. The feeling we get from the totality of the project is one of alienation, anxiety, loneliness. The images are reminiscent of the dystopian work of David Lynch, among others. And they feel like an appropriate coda in many ways to the kind of life that is presented to us every day, with all the distrust and polarization that society seems to be made up of these days.

Vogue Portugal

Welcome to disturbia

By Anna Murcho 2024

Com a série Pest Control, Tania Franco Klein criou um universo paralelo onde os media promovem a ideia de que os pombos dominam o mundo, o que imediatamente provoca o pânico em todos os cidadãos: o medo instala-se, e as armadilhas contra estes animais proliferam. Nos frigoríficos, nas televisões, não há objeto que escape a esta obsessão. Será que esta distopia é assim tão surreal?

A primeira vista, é impossível não encontrar semelhanças com o trabalho de William Eggleston, um dos maiores nomes da chamada "street photography" Com alguma pesquisa, percebe-se que Tania Franco Klein (1990), artista mexicana que trabalha com fotografia, GIF e instalação, até já ganhou um concurso organizado pela Aperture Foundation em homenagem ao icónico fotógrafo. A canalização da sua estética é uma coisa consciente?

"Há muitos fotógrafos de diferentes origens que me inspiraram.

William Eggleston é um deles, mas também tenho muita influência de fotógrafos como Harry Gruyaert, Larry Sultan, Jimmy De Sana, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Jo Ann Callis, etc." Klein estudava arquitetura na Cidade do México quando, pelo caminho, "tropeçou" na fotografia. Conscientemente ou não, o que ficou desses anos ainda hoje se vê nas suas fotografias cinematográficas, de grande escala, que são uma espécie de "exame das ansiedades modernas e das tensões que advêm de viver a vida online com uma fixação constante no autoaperfeiçoamento, na produtividade, nos efeitos da sobre-estimulação dos media e na forma como nos perfilamos a nós próprios e aos outros para nos adaptarmos à nossa compreensão das realidades ecléticas e fragmentadas de hoje. Com uma melancolia assumidamente kitsch, embelezada na estética dos anos 60, quando as coisas "pareciam ser melhores do que agora", Klein consegue levantar, com as suas imagens, questões sobre a modernidade e o quotidiano. O seu trabalho já apareceu em alguns dos mais presti-giados meios de comunicação do mundo, como o jornal The New York Times e a revista TIME, e faz parte das coleções permanentes do MoMA, em Nova lorque, e do Getty Center, em Los Angeles.

"VIVIA EM LONDRES E REPAREI QUE HAVIA ESPIGÕES PARA POMBOS POR TODO O LADO. EM CIMA DAS CABINES TELEFÓNICAS, FORA DOS CAIXILHOS DAS JANELAS, EM CIMA DE CADA LETRA DE UM LETREIRO DA STARBUCKS, ETC. ACHEI QUE ERA UM GESTO ARQUITETÓNICO MUITO PECULIAR MAS INTERESSANTE E, AO MESMO TEMPO, UM GESTO MUITO INVASIVO E VIOLENTO."

Como é que começou a fotografar? Enquanto me licenciava em arquitetura em 2009, tive aulas de fotografia na câmara escura. onde me apaixonei pelo meio e pelas suas infinitas possibilidades Sempre me interessei por criar cenários e narrativas com as minhas imagens, por isso comprei um par de luzes e comecei a aprender sozinha. Em 2014 mudei-me para Londres para receber o meu Mestrado em Fotografia na University of the Arts. Durante o meu tempo lá, sinto que comecei a desenvolver o meu sentido de identidade. tanto visual como concetualmente uma forte ligação às minhas ideias e ao que queria dizer com o meu trabalho.

Foi fácil encontrar a sua estética? Sempre me interessei muito por filosofia e sociologia, não de uma forma formal ou académica. mas mais como uma forma de compreender o meu próprio lugar no mundo. Interessa-me observar e compreender a nossa socie dade coletivamente, e a forma como reagimos ao "sistema" de que todos somos produto. Tento criar projectos que convidem o espectador a refletir sobre a vida contemporânea, tanto de forma pública como privada.

Em termos de processo de pensa-mento, como é que trabalha? Tem um mood board ou uma narrativa em mente antes de fotografar ou as ideias surgem quando começa um novo projeto? Para os meus projetos, tento inspirar-me em diferentes origens. Tenho uma forte influência académica de pensadores como Byung-Chul Han e Marc Augé, o que me dá uma estrutura forte para pensar os meus projetos de forma universal e para mergu-Ihar em tópicos que me interessam muito retratar no meu trabalho. Também trago muita influência de fotógrafos como Harry Gruyaert, Larry Sultan, William Eggleston, Jimmy De Sana, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Jo Ann Callis, etc. Tenho também uma forte ligação a artistas de multimédia e vídeo cujo trabalho me inspiram profundamente, como Tony Oursler, Bill Viola e Pipilotti Rist. Penso que um elemento muito importante do meu trabalho é o seu lado performativo.

Apesar de o meu "tipo" de trabalho ser considerado fotografia encenada, o elemento surpresa tornou-se o meu ingrediente mais importante. Tento, tanto quanto possível, evitar que o meu trabalho pareça artificial. Isso acontece muito com o trabalho encenado e, por vezes, temos a sensação de que podemos ver um desenho de pré-produção a transformar-se numa fotografia, o que, para mim, quebra muita da magia. Por isso, tento encontrar alguma verdade dentro da minha ficção. Estou sempre a tentar lá chegar, às vezes sou mais bem sucedida do que outras, mas é certamente uma procura infinita. A minha abordagem baseia-se muito no jogo. A realização das minhas imagens é um espetáculo muito lúdico. Tenho muitos adereços e elementos, depois uso um deles como ponto de partida e improviso a partir daí. Na maior parte das vezes, não faço ideia do resultado final quando começo, e isso é excitante. Descubro o trabalho no momento.

O que o inspirou a criar esta série, Pest Control? Na altura vivia em Londres e reparei que havia espigões para pombos por todo o lado. Em cima das cabines telefónicas, fora dos caixilhos das janelas, em cima de cada letra de um letreiro da Starbucks, etc. Achei que era um gesto arquitetónico muito peculiar mas interessante e, ao mesmo tempo, um gesto muito invasivo e violento, embora, de alguma forma, se tornasse quase invisível para os olhos. Ao mesmo tempo, houve várias ameaças de bomba por toda a Europa e pude sentir uma tensão muito forte naquilo a que Marc Augé chama os não-lugares entre multidões e estranhos. Esta ideia do medo do"outro" e da forma como esta ameaça externa, a sua aparência e o que devemos temer é fortemente criada pelos media sob narrativas muito particulares. Isso levou-me a querer fazer um exemplo satírico desta situação levada ao extremo. Assim, inventei um universo paralelo em que os meios de comunicação social promovem a ideia de que os pombos estão a dominar o mundo, o que ativa uma linha de pensamento irracional para os cidadãos do mundo e, por isso, as pessoas que agem a partir de um lugar de medo começam aimplementar estes espigões para pombo em todo o lado, mesmo em locais onde talvez não fosse lógico colocá-los. Trata-se de um comentário social sobre a forma como o medo tem sido um instrumento de controlo de massas através dos meios de comunicação e da propaganda, e sobre a facilidade com que se cai neste medo e se começa a agir de forma irracional.

Esta série parece ter um lado marcadamen te kitsch. Concorda? Há, sem dúvida, um lado kitsch nesta série, tanto na forma excêntrica como o conceito foi pensado como na forma como é executado em termos de elementos físicos e de uma certa nostalgia banal. Embora eu ache que o aspeto crítico da série não se enquadra nessa categoria.

Tal como esta série, parte do seu trabalho parece estar enraizado no início dos anos 60.

A outra parte, sobretudo os temas, é bastan te contemporânea (isolamento, consumo, o mito da eterna juventude). Como é que junta essas duas épocas para criar as imagens que procura? Eu diria que, mais do que uma estética dos anos 60, é um universo em que o tempo se mistura através de símbolos ecléticos de dife rentes períodos, a partir do momento em que o capitalismo tardio e as sociedades moldadas pelos meios de comunicação social começaram a tomar forma para se tornarem o que são hoje. É mais ou menos assim que o tempo na era da Internet funciona, não necessariamente de forma linear, e também evoca uma certa sensação de nostalgia de tempos melhores no passado, mas que talvez não fossem necessariamente melhores. A maior parte das minhas séries está inserida no mesmo universo em que a premissa da exposição das personagens ao contexto é um mundo obcecado com a produtividade e o autoaperfeiçoamento e o esgotamento que isso gera em nós e a forma como moldamos as nossas identidades e a vida quotidiana

Aesthetica

A Step Into Unreality (Exhibition review) 2023

Melissa Karlin

Walking through the doors of the ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica, to experience Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein’s (b. 1990) latest project Break in Case of Emergency (Flies, Forks, and Fires), a golden-copper hued party decoration catches one’s eye. Immediately, questions arise of this rather odd statement piece. Was it left over from the opening? Is it always there?  When exploring the space, it becomes clear that this is a part of the artist’s work. The exhibition as a whole isn’t simply displayed, it is a conversation on the very nature of space both within the framing of a photograph and the way this medium is exhibited. As Klein received her BA in Architecture in Mexico City before pursuing a Masters in photography at the University of Arts London, the layout is indicative of a mind that considers space inside and out of frame. In fact, after speaking with Managing Director Angela Bryant, it was revealed that Klein sent a set of blueprints to outline exactly how the work should be displayed.

In the entrance, photographs are hung conventionally. And then, everything changes – images are positioned high, low and centred but also plastered to the wall in vinyl or surrounded by the shining party decorations. Even simple blank space left between each work leaves room for dialogue. The photographs are a party of self-sabotage. A woman stands with her head in a sink. Used cigarettes are used as make-shift birthday candles. A frying pan sits ablaze on a hob as the subject looks on, unbothered. It is a tragic comedy. These whimsical scenes are disturbingly humorous, sad and showcase an absurdity that is inherent with the contemporary experience of being a woman. Are these subjects on the brink of madness, unreality or just over everything entirely? That depends on your mood in the moment.

The fly, something to swat away forces its way into the interior throughout the exhibition, whether literally – like stuck to a pillar – or in the images shown. Throughout, it is a motif, a pest you’d like to ignore or not have indoors, pushing its way in. The final fly-de-resistance is behind a curtain. A pink-hued room is lined with a reflective surface, creating a murky and unbecoming reflection of the beholder. There is a video of a tap seemingly running forever and then … the flies. Oh, the flies … They are infesting the space, forming oddly pleasing shapes in previously insignificant spaces. Now it is their turn to be the artwork because they have always been there – we’ve just been swatting them away.

Described as “reliably absurd,” Klein’s use of forced perspective, light and shadow creates an otherworldly atmosphere, enveloping the subjects and their surrounds. Recently, the artist photographed the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg for Time, utilising similar techniques. Whereas the magazine shoot is subtle, the show at ROSEGALLERY demonstrates an approach to photography that peaks behind the scenes. The viewer bears witness to the absurdity of the mundane – the horror of expectations.

Break in Case of Emergency: Tania Franco Klein on Chasing Catharsis

By Alex Nicholson 2023

A few months ago I wandered through a flea market in Mexico City with Tania Franco Klein while she searched for props that might exist in the world of her photographs. Among the morning's spoils were a few questionable (aren’t they all?) old dolls, a large piece of glass whose original function remains a mystery, an unreasonably large chess set, and an equally tiny deck of classic Lotería gambling cards. Klein is always hunting, chasing a feeling or emotion that she aims to capture in her work. Some paths loop back on themselves; false peaks, detours, and enticing distractions are all part of the process, but it's often the apparent dead ends where the breakthroughs occur. In her latest work, Break in Case of Emergency, now on view at Rose Gallery in LA, it’s a catharsis that she’s been after. For her characters, who have always been stuck, searching, or on the run, it's empowering territory. "I finally found ways for them to really own their space," she explains. "I was so obsessed with particular things happening in the scenes, and it just wasn't working. When I finally gave up on that, I started being playful... and when it finally became playful, it was actually joyful.”

Alex Nicholson: You spent a lot of time imagining the installation for your new exhibition. Were you thinking about that as you were shooting, how the images were going to look on the walls?
Tania Franco Klein: I think this is my best show so far installation-wise. It’s always been such a big part of my work, not just the making of the pieces but how they will look in the gallery. It’s been exciting to realize it. I’ve started working a lot with party elements and backdrops, there's something celebratory in the work in a strange, bizarre way.

Did you expect that when you started this new series?
No, it took me so long to figure it out but that's what always happens. I have a small sense of it, like, a phrase, a title, a feeling, or an emotion that I want to create. But during that process, a lot of things happen and sometimes I go very far in a direction that doesn’t work and I just have to redo and redo and redo.

When we last talked for the magazine you were just hinting about where you thought your new work might be heading. You told me that after the heaviness and intensity of the past several years, you had this thirst for "very explosive things." It’s been interesting hearing how those feelings have evolved into this new body of work.
Even though I think all of my work coexists in the same universe, the physicality and way that my characters exist in this new series are so different from my previous work. It took me so long to detach from my understanding of who my characters were and to find their new language.

How did your characters experience this transformation?
My characters were always very contained. There was always something simmering but they weren’t doing anything about it. They were really stuck in their situations. They were victims of their own thinking, stuck in that psychological process. In Proceed to the Route, they started being a bit more active, trying to run away from themselves and find new paths but for this one, I finally found ways for them to really own their space, to own these scenes I've created for them.

You seem to have settled on the word "catharsis" to explain this.
Yes, when I first started this work I was very interested in the idea of catharsis, but mostly in the way that the spectator experiences catharsis through other characters in cinema, television, and entertainment. I feel like there can be a lot of pleasure in that experience of watching other people do things we might not do in our own lives. Obviously, I'm not talking about violence or killing people, but small little rebellious acts. You get to live that rebellion through someone else. If you see someone breaking things or screaming, there might be some sort of release in that process.

What were those early directions you went in that didn't work?
I did very crazy things. I went to those break and smash rooms and I was doing all this crazy research about experimental therapies and photographing all these extreme moments, but they all felt overly dramatic. They weren't playful. I wanted there to be some enjoyment in the catharsis. So later, instead of concentrating on what was happening in the scene, I decided to concentrate on the emotion itself, which was like this sense of empowerment and knowing that the person in front of you is experiencing this situation where they're doing things their own way. There's this compelling element in the way that we empathize with the characters. We're so well-behaved nowadays. There's something very cathartic about small rebellious acts. I didn't want my characters to suffer because I feel like they were finally so empowered about experiencing life on their own terms and finding their own ways of doing things. I was concentrating too much on the actions themselves that I forgot about what was most important for me, which is always the emotion that you get from that action.

How did you arrive at that point? When did that realization happen?
It’s always connected to the process. I was so obsessed with these particular things happening in the scenes and it just wasn't working. When I finally gave up on that, I started being playful and noticed the importance of subtler things. And when it finally became playful it was actually joyful. Before that point, I was always exhausted. If I’m coming home after a day of working and I’m completely exhausted, that usually means there is something wrong with the work because it should be very invigorating, you know?

We were talking about the film Daisies earlier. That was a big influence on you?
Yes, it's from the '60s and it's about these two girls that get tired of the materialistic, bourgeois society they live in and spend the whole film breaking the way things are done in a very enjoyable, child-like way. They find power in doing things differently than they are supposed to, by experiencing situations their own way. That was very inspiring to me.

Tell me about this other project that’s on display in the gallery, the subject series.
I always try to combine two projects in a show because I feel like there are different elements of my work that coexist together. It’s an anthropological exercise about the way we profile people and the way that we see “the other.” I noticed that because my photographs are so cinematic, people often read the character based on the scene. So what I’ve done is take a scene and recreate it with a lot of different subjects. The same photograph with a different character in it. How would we read that, then? How would we change the way that we read it based on our different cultural and personal backgrounds?

Logistically how did you manage the project? How many people were you photographing?
106 people, 10 minutes per person, and one after the other. It was so much different from the way that I normally work. It's not so experimental, where I'm changing the scene and moving around. It was super invigorating for me to suddenly go from being alone 24-7 to shooting 106 people. It was so interesting. Nobody knew what they were doing there, haha. I explained a little bit but I feel like unless you see the whole project, it’s hard to understand.

How many of these scenes are you going to do?
There are going to be 10 chapters because I feel like if you see it all together it’s too much information. It’s better to see one chapter and then release another at a different time.

You've told me each project is a process of working through something for yourself. With this exhibition do you feel like you’ve worked through this idea? Is it done?
No, the project is not done. None of my shows have ever been with a finished project. It's just a place in the project. It took me so long to get the language of the work to understand it that there's still energy in me to discover new ways of getting to that place. I feel like when I stop doing a body of work is when I feel like I can redo it over and over and over and over with my eyes closed because the language is so much a part of my brain. That's when it gets boring. There isn’t that excitement of having no fucking clue how I’m going to get to the next point.

How much of that is the surprise of not knowing what you’re going to get and the excitement of seeing the result?
That’s exactly it. When I lose the surprise element or I feel like things are becoming too redundant, that’s when the project has reached its limit.

Does exhibiting the work before you feel it's finished help you finish? Just seeing it on the wall and experiencing it physically and watching other people experience it?
Definitely, yeah. There's nothing like physically experiencing how everything comes together. When that happens, I realize which areas of the work I can explore more, especially with the complicated installations I’ve been building. I would like to do more pieces like that or think more in that way. But that's only after I actually finished doing it in the show, that I realize that.

That's such an interesting idea because I would imagine many people might think that an exhibition or book is often a finished project.
I never see it as a finishing point. It's kind of like a starting point for something to grow in a separate direction that might complement the work in a different way.

APERTURE

Mercado de Sonora (MEXICO CITY ISSUE)

Chloe Aridjis 2019

Many of Tania Franco Klein’s photographs depict female figures who seem lost in the vastness of an inhospitable landscape or in a moment of contemplation, the edges of the self contained within those of a geometrical interior. Her images are bathed in a warm cinematic light, boudoi red, and suffused with a Lynchian sense of menace—they resemble film stills taken midnarrative, though it’s unclear whether the climactic moment has yet taken place.

For her newest series, Mercado de Sonora (2019), Franco Klein focuses her gaze for the first time, after many photographic projects abroad, on her native Mexico. In the past, she has often donned a wig and turned the camera on herself; in this body of work, her mother and grandmother become the models in an extended form of self-portraiture that captures the ways in which beliefs are passed from generation to generation. The Mercado de Sonora, a vast traditional market in southeast Mexico City, is a space, Franco Klein explains, where class boundaries dissolve: a cross-section of society, from the house servant to the industrialist’s wife, comes here to find esoteric cures. The politics of the marketplace are evident in its gender distribution: women sell spells, men sell animals. For alongside the stalls of abracadabra and Santa Muerte figurines is a squirming menagerie of trafficked wildlife, a vast array of fauna crammed into cages, heaped on one another, struggling for air and space. Around 70 percent of creatures transported to the market die en route, and those that survive often meet their end in a gruesome Santeria ritual or, in the case of the more exotic species, as pets to narco juniors. For decades, authorities have turned a blind eye toward this lucrative hub of illegal trafficking. Because of the rampant criminal activity, photography at the market is strictly forbidden. Franco Klein decided to shift the context and bring the spells, the promises being sold, into a more private realm, in order to explore what happens once these products are taken home. In doing so, she has created spaces of longing and atmospheric ambiguity, where every detail is freighted with forensic significance. Over and over, the viewer is invited to imagine the psychodrama unfolding within. In one disquieting photograph, a hand appears to hold down the shoulder of a woman in a silky dress and black wig, while the other hand runs an egg over her head as part of a limpia, or spiritual cleansing, the negative energy extracted condensing into shadow. Elsewhere, the components of an abandoned magic spell are strewn across a carpeted floor in a palette of dusk reds and greens—a small voodoo doll, a lock of hair, a burnt candle. Nearby, the feet of a woman soak in a green bowl; it’s unclear whether this is part of the ritual. Another photograph shows three perfume bottles, one resting on a two-hundred-peso note, on a linoleum floor; meeting them head-on is the white shoe of a woman. Both images suggest a schism between the magical product and the human subject, an abyss between expectation and fulfillment. Animals, the most troubling “items” for sale at the Mercado de Sonora, feature in the two darkest photographs. A piglet perches on a table covered by a red cloth; it stares at the camera, accompanied only by its shadow, like a stage prop missing its magician. In the other, a green velvet sofa is juxtaposed with the curled tail of a (presumably dead) crocodile. Torn from their habitats, these animals, decontextualized in the marketplace, appear now even further estranged from nature. The most hopeful composition—should faith be correlative to levels of brightness—shows a green soap and its box, which bears the words Ven a mi (Come to me), resting on a bathroom shelf alongside a plastic green comb and a bright red dustpan. The playful primary color scheme, set against a blue-tiled wall, evokes an optimism absent from the murk incertitude elsewhere Throughout this series of lyrical and unsettling mise-en-scènes, Franco Klein deconstructs the human subject and the magic charm. Female figures—defamiliarized by wigs or disembodied—interact with spells that have also, in some way, become fragmented. In our Mexico, a country beset by violence, poverty, and environmental crisis, these images depict an unshakable belief in enchantment, however tenuous its promise.

SLEEK Magazine

The Photograoher turning anxiety into art

by Harriet Shepherd 2018

“Feelings are universal,” says Tania Franco Klein, neatly encapsulating one of the key premises of her work. “Everyone knows loneliness. We all know how it feels to be lost.”

Through her cinematic images, which dissect the American dream, the 28-year-old Mexican photographer hones in on the essence of anguish. It’s something Franco Klein is no stranger to. Her entry into self-portraiture was a personal reaction to anxiety. “I used to be very outgoing,” she says “I used to be able to go out to the street and approach strangers and bring them to the set. But now I've come to a point where I just can't talk to people.”

Turning the lens on herself became a way to continue her practice. “It wasn’t a choice, I just had no other option. I couldn’t process anything else in my life. I couldn’t work with people. It took over me. I had insomnia and most of my work was made between one and five a.m. It would come out of me being completely anxious – it was very solitary.” During this period, she began creating roles for herself. “I wanted to talk about the things I was feeling. This anxiety, it’s an epidemic. We are a suffering society and we need to talk about [it].” This apparently global feeling of displacement is part of the reason Franco Klein’s work can be appreciated by anyone.

Her fans include Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro, who in March this year tweeted a link to an essay about her work in the Paris Review, as well as the 20,000 people who follow her Instagram account, @taniafrancoklein.

Her visceral images employ dramatic mise-en-scene to explore the uncertain and confusing scope of human emotion, and the space between darkness and light. In them, her characters are simultaneously lit in cinematic glory and swallowed by shadows in a palpable expression of loneliness and longing.

In her series Our Life In The Shadows (2018), a woman stares listlessly out of an open window, perched on a kitchen table. In another image from this collection, a different woman gazes through the mottled glass of her shower, conjuring a deep sense of sadness. Elsewhere, her 2017 installation Positive Disintegration, shown at Mexico City’s Zona Maco Foto Art Fair, takes its title from Mental Growth Through Positive Disintegration (1970), a book by the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski, who claimed that personality development may increase following periods of trauma and depression. “Once you enter the universe of my characters, you feel something,” Franco Klein explains, and it’s true.

Her works may speak of the past, with their nondescript and nostalgic timeframes, peppered with retro TVs and vintage wallpaper, but they resonate with the present, her characters plagued by the same fears we face in this age of anxiety. “I’m interested in that space between coming and going, that sense that life is never full. I feel like my characters are between this personal fight that we all have.” Franco Klein actually discovered photographywhile studying architecture at Mexico City’s Centre of Design, Cinema and Television. “I just fell in love with the possibilities of the medium,” she remembers. “It’s so approachable, anyone can understand photography.” Following her architecture degree, Franco Klein enrolled on a photography course in Mexico but became disillusioned with its rule-based tuition, so moved to the UK and began an MA in Fashion Photography at University of the Arts London.

Her approach to her craft was always different from other students, she says. “My teacher could see that I wasn’t interested in studio fashion, I was always interested in the concept, about talking about things to do with life.” This attitude is evident in her Vanitas Spectacle (2018), a conceptual series staged alongside work by Paris and Lebanon-based photographer Dorine Potel at Mexico City’s Almanaque Fotográfica gallery. Alongside Potel’s brightly-coloured images, Franco Klein presents a collection of moodily-lit photos that develop her experiments with chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and dark. “There's something very thrilling to me about working with light,” Franco Klein explains. “It gives me this adrenalin.” This dramatic rendering of light and shadow lends her work its filmic quality. “For me, it was always about creating, I love going out with my camera and just taking photographs of things I find, but I just don't think it's my work.” Instead, she carefully crafts alternate realities, scenes in which her drama unfolds. Unsurprisingly, Franco Klein grew up in a household of cinephiles. “I would go to the cinema four times a week growing up,” she remembers. “It’s always been a part of my life.” She says Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian epic, is her favourite movie, and it’s easy to discern this retro-futuristic influence in her work – a mix between past and present, nostalgia and displacement. “You can find me somewhere between Mexico City and California,” she explains. “But I never spend more than a month in one place.”