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Indepth Arts News:
"Cammino a Roma, Photographs by David Franck"
2002-06-08 until 2002-07-07
fototeka
Los Angeles, CA,
USA United States of America
In his urban series, artist David Franck seeks out the illusory,
fiction-building power of photography: elegantly overlaid images produce
an undulating but unified space composed of multiple perspectives. In
horizontal format (19.5 x 5 inches, 8.5 x 38), they are often melancholy
and unabashedly romantic, defying the idea that photography is
fundamentally about pinning down a single moment. (In the studio,
photographed images are assembled and projected onto a matte of thick
papers; the resulting images are then photographed again.)
Franck's most recent urban series, ìCammino a Roma,î creates a place where
time and form come together as an entity. Playing with proportion, the
pictures undermine a conventional sense of reality. The compositions are
often playful, filled with a sense of joy and surprise at the hues and
textures of the city. In "Trevi Fountain," the architectural details of at least two large
buildings with columns flow into one another, photographed from different
distances, amid diaphanous palms and other trees. Distance is impossible
to measure as statues float in a kind of dream-time approximation of
space. There are many hard edges but no seams, or easily identified points
of transition, as buildings in the distance and close up yield their
claims -- one after another -- to the viewer. With no fixed horizon line,
the viewer enters instead into the artist's point of view, which is
unified, stable amid the flux of his pictures. Of this series, Franck says, "Here markers of the past meld into a modern
city. ... This flow is what I've translated into the photographic form.
I've updated the role of the flanner, photographer as visual collector of
the city. Facades, sculpture and the life of the city become united into a
panorama of a visual river." Franckís 2000 show at Fototeka Gallery, ìDusk Between,î featured the
streets of Los Angeles in the in between hours when light changes most
rapidly.
Franck studied photography and painting at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. He holds an M.F.A. in photography from California Institute of
the Arts and has exhibited widely in Southern California. His work also
has been exhibited in shows in Amarillo, TX; El Paso, TX; Akron, Ohio;
Athens, Ohio; Seattle, WA; and many other places.
wards include first prize, "The Twenty-Four Collection," from Everson
Museum in Syracuse, NY, and the Lew and Edie Wasserman Scholarship, from
California Institute of the Arts.
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