"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, ěCammino 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, ěDusk 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.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in Los Angeles