Sara Tecchia Roma New York is proud to present Untitled, a duet exhibition of two American photographers, Benjamin Fink and Alex Prager.

New photography demands a new assessment of the medium. In recent years, photography, once the domain of the documentary or quasi-documentary, has appropriated the expressive impulses of painting, the meticulous image management of draftwork, and the staged-not merely composed-theatrical aspects of a film set. The camera has become an inward instrument, delivering self-examination for our consumption.

Freud believed that significant psychic events take place below the surface of the unconscious mind. These events, he thought, have both symbolic and actual significance for the psyche and can affect our visual interpretations and awareness. The photographs of Benjamin Fink, inspired by the Hudson River School and part of his Shadow Realms series, evoke vast panoramas of memory and introspection. Their ethereal beauty forces us to question the straightforwardness, once taken for granted, of their documentation; are these real or constructed visions? Fink seeks out vistas that evoke loneliness and even despair; places that have borne witness to change, whether by people or by forces of nature, benign or malignant. These stories, which often accompany the photograph, are manifested in his images. Despite the darkness of that vision, embedded in each image is a resilient glimmer of hope.

In photographs from her Polyester series, Alex Prager similarly tests the audiences’ willingness to question the inherited authority of the camera. It can be said about Prager, as has been said about David Lynch, that any artist concerned with the subconscious is at their best when there is a balance between the strange and the familiar. Within Prager’s photographs we see a constructed reality that is outside our time but brimming with contemporaneity. Within her works we come against the angst and desperation of a 1950s pre-feminist world with a polished high-sheen of the 21st century photographic aesthetic. The figures seem frozen, in time and by an inability to confront their, and perhaps our own, anxiety.

For all their apparent divergences, the photographs of these two artists visually collide and are brought together through mood. Their works are suggestive beyond the frame: Prager’s images as interior shots, just off canvas, or deep within Fink’s landscapes – an uncanny layering of one work within the other. The photographs of Fink and Prager photographs are a suitable marriage of uncomfortable silences, frigid quietude and the uneasy light breeze before the storm: the anxiety of contrast and contradiction.

Additional information and images available upon request.