Harsh Exposures

Faked Scenes, Real Feelings

The acid-green bathroom could be in a cheap motel. I’ve been in a bathroom like that, after a rough night’s sleep, under buzzing fluorescent light. You have too. You don’t feel great, but you know you have to get through the day.

A new MoMA photo exhibit features the work of Tania Franco Klein (TFK). She’s created a large series of staged photographs called “Subject Studies: Chapter 1.”

Some of these are posed in a bathroom, a private space, where one does not have to “perform” for others.

Yet these individuals are all aware that they are being photographed, as they “perform” a private hygiene ritual.

When am I performing? Always. Even in the bathroom, the mirror is a stage for self-judgment. We are our own most demanding audience.

TFK says that her photos are “psychological landscapes “ and considers her practice to be “emotional archeology.“

The artist cites the book “The Burnout Society,” and its claim that each of us is chronically exhausted from “hustle culture” and being caught on a never-ending treadmill. In our state of hyperactive capitalism, inconvenient emotions are seen as obstructions to optimal productivity.

Looking with empathy at the photos, one feels weary and depressed. (Note the prescription meds above the faucet.)

TFK’s photos are often soaked in a toxic nostalgia. They could be cinematic stills from an ‘80s Brian de Palma thriller. We sense that something bad is going to happen.

Tania Franco Klein stages this tension in hostile rooms. Her photos are faux-documentaries. My essays are a similar fiction: an “intimate and casual” voice, the paragraphs carefully edited and placed.

We are always performing our own authenticity – even intimacy is stage-managed.

The bathroom promises privacy, but offers only another surface: mirror, self-consciousness where exhaustion has nowhere to hide.

But noticing the staging loosens something: the mirror’s grip, the demand for perfect authenticity.

The bathroom remains a horrible sick-green space. The fluorescent light still on. Yet I love these photos, and the whole artistic project – the rawness.

Perhaps the audacity lies not in hiding exhaustion, but in embracing its unglamorous truth.

In a culture that turns even privacy into performance, exhaustion becomes the most honest form of resistance.

None of us looks good in our undershirt. When we stop hiding the fatigue, the performance itself cracks, and for a moment, we are simply there: human, messy, and bare under the harsh light.

An honest presence.

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NOTES

All photos are copyright the artist Tania Franco Klein.

More info about the artist:

https://www.taniafrancoklein.com/subject-studies

Book, The Burnout Society :

https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society

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