Guest curator Maria Iovino and Melissa Harris will discuss Fernell Franco’s Amarrados series offering insight into the creative process behind Franco’s exploration of social photographic practices, and the importance of this series as a distinctive voice in Latin American photography.

About the exhibition: Fernell Franco (1942-2006) is considered one of the few photographers who developed a distinct lyrical view of the shift toward modernity in Latin America. The exhibition Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound] is focused on the Amarrados series comprising large-scale black and white photographs developed by Franco in the early 1980s. Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound] will be the first solo exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States.

Fernell Franco: Amarrados [Bound] features twenty vintage prints and a number of preparatory studies that Franco produced in order to create the series. Franco conceived his photographs in street markets in Colombia and other Latin American countries from the 1980s onwards, featuring wrapped up devices and isolated inanimate objects typically used by informal vendors to protect their merchandise. Franco’s images are devoid of human presence, conveying death, solitude, violence, abandonment, and mystery.

Franco was a self-taught photographer who as a child lived through the upsurge of the Colombian civil conflict and was forced to move from rural Versalles to Cali. He worked as a photojournalist for local newspapers such as Diario Occidente and El País de Cali, and for Cromos magazine. Franco was awarded the Gold Medal at Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales en Bogotá in 1976, the First Photography Prize at the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba in 1984, and the Colombian Award for Photography in 2001.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fundación Fernell Franco, Colombia.