Book club: Positive Disintegration by Tania Franko Klein

Tanya Franco Klein is a Mexican photographer who has quickly established a name for herself over the last couple of years with her series of self portraits and still lives of domestic life.

I first became aware of her at Photo London last year when her series “Proceed to the route” earned her the Breakthrough award for best newcomer. Since then her career has taken off with campaigns for Dior and multiple editorials for the likes of Vogue and the New Yorker.

This is her first book, Positive Disintegration, published by Editions Bessard in Paris last year, and I picked up a copy right away. It’s an expansion of an earlier series called “Our life in the shadows”

Here she is taking us through it:

The book is beautifully produced with a soft textured cover and a limited edition signed print in a sleeve inside the back cover.

The work is a mixture of self portraits of the artist dressed as an alter-ego, not unlike Cindy Sherman’s famous Film Stills series, and quiet domestic scenes. The pictures are almost universally bathed in a warm, golden light that suggest warmth and comfort while the content often juxtaposes this, suggesting alienation and a feeling of boredom and entrapment.

In her artist’s statement she says “the work is influenced by the pursuit of the American Dream lifestyle in the Western World and contemporary practices such as leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, eternal youth, and the psychological sequels they generate in our everyday private life. The project seeks to evoke a mood of isolation, desperation, vanishing, and anxiety, through fragmented images, that exist both in a fictional way and a real one.”

To me the work also seems to be a commentary on how advertising and media have shaped our perception of the role of women in society. Facsimiles of mid-century advertising, often showing casual misogyny, are spaced throughout the book. The accompanying photographs show a woman who feels lost or trapped.

The photographs are certainly distinctive and show a surprising level of maturity for an artist at the start of her career. Her use of coloured light and deep shadows makes her work instantly recognisable. The book itself is a beautiful object and the photographs nicely printed. I’m certainly looking forwards to see what she does next.