Her photographic practice oscillates between reality and fiction in a strange space where dramatic pairings of light and shadow play on perspectives like film stills.
Tania Franco Klein’s portfolio is a fascinating play of cinematic images saturated with light and color. In her narrative process, this native of Mexico City probes the social behaviors of society through consumption, the media circus of performance, the obsession with eternal youth, and the American dream. She thus highlights the deep psychological after-effects they generate in daily life. Her work reveals itself as a mental journey of initiation that depicts female characters, giving in to this tendency towards isolation, despair, self-effacement, and anxiety. Her (self)portraits and intimate interior/exterior scenes are expressed in fragmented images that are both fictional and real. It’s no wonder that this Master’s graduate in photography from the University of the Arts in London was quickly noticed.
Since then, she has exhibited her singular vision throughout Europe, the United States, and Mexico, collaborating with major magazines such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, L.A Times and The Guardian, and brands such as Dior. More recently, she reached the firmament with the magnificent portrait of the great Steven Spielberg on the cover of Time 100.
From the aesthetic to the existential
Her last two exhibitions have lit up the walls of the Rosegallery, which represents her in Santa Monica. Starting with “Proceed to the Route,” which probes these paths of “progress” and gentrification. Here, Tania Franco Klein reflects on the “map” as a representation of territory and the “Internet” as a representation of life. “Progress has overtaken us, leaving a state of nothingness and confusion in our eclectic and hyper-connected reality where history runs faster than the seconds on the clock,” she explains. “It is in the emptiness of the countryside that we can locate the encounter of an old way of life that still awaits its abandonment and confinement, reflecting the new growth of a central capitalist system.”
Through these roads, the photographer thus traces a story of loneliness, unease, loss of bearings and meaning. In “Positive Disintegration,” her first monograph, which also includes her series “Our Life in the Shadows,” she is inspired by the theories of philosopher Byung-Chul Han. That is to say, this compulsion to constantly perform, which has made fatigue and exhaustion the evil of the century. A “neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases between depression, burn out, and attention disorder, hyperactivity, bipolar. The artist thus places this contradiction at the center of her images where she and this forsaken humanity try to escape.
Mexico