OUR LIFE IN THE SHADOWS
BY TANIA FRANCO KLEIN
Our Life in the Shadows 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. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. We have left behind the immunological era, and now experience the neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome and bipolar disorder. The constant need to escape, to always look outside. My characters find themselves almost anonymous, melting in places, vanishing into them, constantly looking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate and exhausted. Constantly in an odd line between trying and feeling defeated.
About the author
Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990) started her photography praxis while gaining her BA Architecture in Mexico City, which took her to pursue her Master in Photography at the University of the Arts London. Her work is highly influenced by her fascination with social behavior and contemporary practices such as leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, emotional disconnection, the obsession with eternal youth, the American dream in the Western world and the psychological sequels they generate in our everyday life. Franco-Klein work has been reviewed and featured by international critique including Aperture Foundation, The British Journal of Photography, Fisheye Magazine and I-D Magazine (UK), Der Greif, amongst others. And has been exhibited in London, Budapest, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, New York, Vermont, Photo Basel and during the Los Angeles Month of Photography 2017 by Lucie Foundation. She has obtained the Sony World Photography Awards, The Lensculture Exposure Awards, The Felix Schoeller Photo Award of Germany Nominee, amongst others.