I am a storyteller who constructs visual tableaux to grapple with and express contradictory ambiguities. Each image is a separate story, immediately personal.
Over the past few years, I have noticed a sense of absence, disconnection, and disquiet permeating my life and those around me — longing despite proximity, loneliness within the sunny illusion of domestic tranquility, shadows on a lit day, realism within illusion.
My visual narratives expand on the noir tradition of exposing fragility, desire, and lost kinship. I place my subjects in uncertain settings, just out of reach of companionship. They are as elusive as a shadow or are absorbed in their interior lives. The play of light within a shadowy space — with its evocation of silence — gradually brings on a sense of existential isolation. An empty space suggests an absence or the liminal space between this world and the next. Geometry, especially in the use of rectangles and diagonals, seems to suggest stability, refuge, and a solid foundation, but it can’t submerge one’s sense of unease. Vibrant fantasies trap viewers in a distorted perception of time and space, eventually offering a potential ‘escape hatch’ by way of a lit window, a mirror, or door left ajar.
Fran Forman has an MFA from Boston University and an MSW in psychiatric social work. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis and teaches digital collage at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been exhibited widely, both locally and internationally, and her photographs have won many awards, including the 2012 Px3 Prix de la Photographie and the International Photography Awards in 2010 and 2008. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
