Thursday, December 25, 2008

The Night...

official writ on exhibit see below picture.

polaroid by: Flavia Sollner
polaroid of the citroen in the tunnel 

11/2008 -12/2008

“Flash blindness is caused by the oversaturation of light in the retina. This blindness happens at the most densified space of seeing. At night, the dark-adapted pupil is wide open so flash blindness has a greater effect.

The night permeates Flavia Sollner’s photographs. In her recent work, using a long exposure that denies the capture of a precise moment, she sheds the transitory details of time. A flicker of light in the middle distance reveals another world, one with a different time, at once both myth and reality, dark, intimate and always surprising. What is revealed in that flash of light is the possibility to see beyond the blindness. […].

In a questioning of the ‘original image’, Flavia developed a technique with Polaroid film for this project. As the milky white turns to dark there is an intimacy that takes place between the photographer, the scene and the print. The sense of literal presence of “being there” that a Polaroid gives is unparalleled, for you are with the scene and the image at once. Standing in the scene itself, these new Polaroids can trigger suppressed hallucinations, a reconfiguration of shadowed stories at once beautiful, genuine and scary.”

Text by Amal Khalaf 
(Amal Khalaf is the Co- director of Hold&Freight. The curatorial space in which my project ‘The Night…’ came about after I accepted her invitation to use the premises, an old railway arch tunnel in central London, to my hearts content.)