Exhibitions

El Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, la Fundacion Fernell Franco in Cali, and the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University are proud to present the exhibition An Impeccable Solitude: The Photographs of Fernell Franco at El Museo Nacional de Columbia in Bogotá from February 23 to April 24, 2011.

Co-curated by José Falconi (Curator at the Art Forum Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University) and Ángela Gomez (Curator of Photography at El Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá), An Impeccable Solitude is the first critical reassessment of the work and legacy of Fernell Franco after his untimely death in early 2006. This show marks the culmination of a five-year project by the Rockefeller Center to conserve, catalog, and digitize Franco’s entire archive, a process that resulted in the revelation of new facets of Franco’s work, which was always centered around his fundamental preoccupation: the depiction of decadence and the continuous cycle of construction and destruction in his beloved city of Cali. The exhibition presents, from this archive, one hundred never-before-seen works that place Franco at the forefront of experimentation in the medium in the last part of the twentieth century.

By emphasizing the narrative techniques that the artist devised and deployed throughout his four-decade career, this exhibition presents Franco as one of the most innovative and experimental photographers at a critical moment in the history of photography, one that transcended the paradigm of photography as a mere document and the photographer as mere documentarian. While most of his contemporaries across Latin America were still working within the old framework, Franco was experimenting with and pushing the limits of photography, developing the ways in which we define its practice today.

Press review

Press review

for more information please visit http://www.museonacional.gov.co/sites/FernellFranco/