Navel gazing can get a little old, so, in the coming weeks (months?), as we find ourselves counting the hours till lunchtime on the sofa, we look for productive and creative ways to spend our days. In hopes of inspiring each other, we’ll be sharing some projects by photographers who have used the medium to explore the crevices and vistas of their home or neighborhood.

Tania Franco Klein's work is highly influenced by her fascination with social behavior and  contemporary view of leisure and consumption, and how that spills over into media overstimulation and emotional disconnection.  The American dream in the Western world, with its obsessive worship of youth, creates plenty of fodder for her preoccupation. 

Klein is influenced by the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who believes that our incessant compulsion to perform produces an atmosphere of exhaustion and fatigue, that having left behind the immunological era we now experience the neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome, and bipolar disorder. Drawing inspiration from his theories, Klein places this contradiction at the center of her autobiographical project.

With their constant need to escape, to always look outside, her characters find themselves almost anonymous, melting in places, vanishing into them, constantly looking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate, exhausted and constantly in straddling the feeling of striving but feeling defeated.

See more from our Sheltering in Place series here.

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