Inevitable Stress: Fransheska Larios

 

Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography:

1. “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
2. “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.“

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

1. “Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time; the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable; the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world.”
2. “Across the scenes, Weems changes roles as others join her in the room. She moves from lover to friend to mother and to herself, alone. She commands the stage—she plays a woman aware of the viewer, sometimes stealing a glance while others remain oblivious, at other times directly confronting the camera.”

The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews

1. “No wonder the work of so many artists parallels Sherman’s, or at least mines similar conceptual veins: role-playing and the nature of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the pressure to conform to the images of perfection promulgated through television, film, and advertising.”
2. “With Photoshop anything goes, and I don’t want to make easy crazy characters just because I can. I think there are some artists who are fine without any boundaries. It somehow frees them. But I really need certain limitations to know how far I can go and work within that.”