Photographer Tania Franco Klein Is Inscrutable at Yancey Richardson

In 2017, photographer Tania Franco Klein visited nowhere—or as close to nowhere as she could be. She traveled to a small desert town in California, which, aside from the occasional RV and car, was barren. In fact, Franco Klein found a lot of abandoned cars, and she wedged herself between these vehicles, set up her camera equipment and shot. It was there that she captured one of her seminal photographs: Car, Window (Self-portrait) from her Proceed to the Route series.

In the photograph, a primly dressed Franco Klein shields her eyes from the desert sun. Her figure foregrounds a desert vista of RVs, parked akimbo, and mountains. Warm, murky desert tones wash over the photograph. Curiously, the image of Franco Klein, the proximal RVs and the mountains are all captured from the inside of a car. And though we are asymptotically close to the photographer, her image–and her effect–is always negotiated through the car’s interior. We get the sense that the photographer desires to obscure herself.

Franco Klein’s photography exhibition “Long Story Short” at the Yancey Richardson gallery makes clear that obscurity is the currency Franco Klein trades in. The exhibition, which pulls works from Franco Klein’s seminal series Break in Case of Emergency, Proceed to the Route and Positive Disintegration, maps the artist’s intentions.

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Take Toaster (Self-portrait) from her Positive Disintegration series. Toaster (Self-portrait) is an analog of Car, Window (Self-portrait) Again, Franco Klein does not photograph herself in direct contact with the lens but as filtered through another object. This time it’s a toaster. We see her listless face, slumped on a dining room table, reflected through a Proctor Silex toaster. The features of her likeness are distorted and spread wide by the appliance’s exterior. In the bottom right corner, nearly cut off by the frame, is the true, skin-and-bones Franco Klein. With the real Franco Klein nearly undetectable, we’re left to grapple with her distorted, enigmatic likeness. 

In another work, Contained (Self-portrait), Franco Klein is hemmed into an old boxy CRT television. The texture of the screen obscures the photographer’s face, and Franco Klein, in all her graininess and grayscale, constitutes a small fraction of an image that’s mostly a drab, poorly lit room. A warm glow from an adjacent room intrudes into the image; it is the only thing preventing Franco Klein from plunging into the belly of pitch-darkness. 

There’s this idea that if you capture the world, in whatever mode of creation, it becomes less ambiguous and more defined. It’s the philosophy that sends myth busters hunting for Bigfoot. It’s what novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor meant when she said, “I write to discover what I know.” Here, Franco Klein scraps it all. In her self-portraiture, the photographer is not interested in making herself less ambiguous to the public or in chipping away at mythology. She’s not even interested in finding herself in her art. What could have been a longer story, an extended unpacking, is always left abridged in her work.

In a Guardian interview, the photographer tells journalist Edward Siddons that she doesn’t see herself in her work. “I’m completely detached. The people in the images are characters. […] I see myself as a tool for the work. Self-portraits aren’t a way for me to work out things about myself—if anything, they are a way of hiding myself.”

It can seem that the world, its institutions and people, expect us to work towards defining ourselves. In her self-portraiture, Franco Klein implores us to take time to shirk public definition, to be lost and remote—however uneconomical the world may take us to be.

Tania Franco Klein, “Long Story Short” will be on view at Yancey Richardson through December 21.