Flash blindness is caused by the oversaturation of light in the retina. This blindness happens at the most densified space of seeing. At night, the dark-adapted pupil is wide open so flash blindness has a greater effect.
The night permeates Flavia Sollner’s photographs. In her recent work, using a long exposure that denies the capture of a precise moment, she sheds the transitory details of time. A flicker of light in the middle distance reveals another world, one with a different time, at once both myth and reality, dark, intimate and always surprising. What is revealed in that flash of light is the possibility to see beyond the blindness.
In a questioning of the ‘original image’, Flavia developed a technique with Polaroid film for this project. As the milky white turns to dark there is an intimacy that takes place between the photographer, the scene and the print. The sense of literal presence of “being there” that a Polaroid gives is unparalleled, for you are with the scene and the image at once. Standing in the scene itself, these new Polaroids can trigger suppressed hallucinations, a reconfiguration of shadowed stories at once beautiful, genuine and scary.
The exhibition was of new work by Flavia Sollner, her first solo show in London. A series of polaroids were shot in Hold & Freight and were exhibited in the show. The Night... ran from 14th – 23rd November then until 15th December 2008 by appointment only. The project was curated by Amal Khalaf.
For more on Flavia Sollner and her work please see:
www.flaviasollner.com
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