These days girls don’t leave anything to the imagination, but the discreet charm of Flavia Sollner’s photography harkens back to the olden days when less was more and a subject didn’t have to show pubic hair to get noticed. Sollner’s photographs utilize the lost arts of mystery and allure that is all but absent in the current climate of over-exposed, Juergen Teller and American Apparell campaigns.
Often using nighttime as a veil, Sollner strategically lifts the darkness to show us the mysterious goings-on of her dark fancy: a flash over the shoulder-blade, carlights over the frozen ridges of a country road, dawn over troubled water. And although her work cinematic - even sinister, it is often described as “fairy-tale’. While this connection is apparent in a few of the titles, many share more in common with stills from a Cohen Brothers thriller than an Angela Carter story. Suspense and fear permeate these photos as much as any magic.
Brazilian-Bred and Norweigian-Raised, she simultaneously evokes the overgrown rainforests of Belem (where the Amazon meets the ocean) and the stark darkness of the Oslo
wintertime (where the sun barely rises in January). Infact,a large part of the intrigue of her work lies in that neither-nor netherworld where tropical meets frigid and girl meets boy.
It’s the oldest story in the world, one of opposites attracting, repelling, loving and fighting. And it’s this distinctive tone of epic yet private conflict in her work and practice that have garnered much attention as her photographs and interviews have appeared in Marie Claire Italia, Zoe Magazine, WeltKunst, Image Magazine and Soup. She’s also enjoyed a fair bit of exposure via the exhibition racket at the Year ’07 Art Fair here in London’s City Hall, Mi Art! in Milan, Close to Dark in Venice and at Galerie Poller, New York.
So it seems that Sollner’s photography has certainly struck and sucked in fans and collectors alike in the already oversaturated world of photography. And although it’s taken restraint and skill to court the crowd, Sollner understands that there’s no pleasure in the immediate gratification of flashy sensationalism.
Sophia Al-Maria