TRACEY BARAN – IN PROCESS
2016-10-10This exhibition surveys the brief life and career of a young photographer who in barely more than one decade, produced an expansive visual diary composed of both spontaneously recorded moments and posed depictions. It provides a unique opportunity to experience her evolving aesthetic through more than one hundred contact sheets, small studies in color and black and white, and large color prints.
Within a continuing tradition of autobiographical images in American photography, from the distant formality of Alfred Stieglitz to the snapshot-style confrontations of Nan Goldin, Baran’s photographs are notable for their composed insights and emotional honesty.
The critic Barry Schwabsky, upon first seeing her work almost twenty years ago, recalled her photographs as “a rare combination of empathy and frankness . . . emotionally raw and formally self-possessed. I wondered how someone so young could look at things so knowingly.” Curator Karen Irvine wrote that “like Eggleston, Baran is fluent in the expressive capacity of color photography and she often counterbalances the formal beauty of her pictures with a certain unsettling ambiguity.” Vince Aletti wrote in The New Yorker that “Baran telegraphs the fraught nuances of relationships – with her father, a female friend, or a lover who’s no more than a hand cupping her face on a couch – so efficiently that her pictures feel like epigrams, terse and telling.”
Opposite – Untitled (Double Self-Portrait), 2008
Exhibition runs through to November 12th, 2016
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
535 West 22nd Street
New York
NY 10011
