Unless noted, all images ©Fran Forman
Eleven
This is Dek Unu Magazine. In Esperanto, dek unu means "eleven." Eleven images from a single artist. Eleven artists in eleven solo issues each year.
Dek Unu publishes the work of a new photoartist in each issue. The artist's work and words are featured alone and in individual focus as the sole purpose for each issue of the magazine. Unlike other arts and letters magazines which might look for work from a variety of artists to support an editorial staff's theme, at Dek Unu, theme and imagery are always each artist's own.
New England artist-photographer Fran Forman creatively combines straight photography, digital photo-manipulation, painting, and stage design to create images that are highly emotionally charged instants, captured in enigmatic, clock-stopped silence. She thinks of each image as a still in a noir movie frame, a single elusive moment among moments, or, in another way, a rest between two notes. Solitary figures, sometimes blurred, turned away, or immersed in shadow, live in stylized geometric spaces, splashed with light and saturated color. Acknowledging a debt to the 17th century Masters’ chiaroscuro, along with Edward Hopper’s trademark directional light, and the moody, stylized work of certain poetic cinematographers, Forman creates personal dreamscapes that often seem oddly familiar to the rest of us. These are “interiors,” both literally and figuratively. Most are shots in rooms, hallways, and stairwells; even the one landscape in the series conveys a distinct sense of enclosure. But by her creative craft, the artist also creates a palpable effect of psychological space, an effect that encloses both the viewer and the viewed in a shared, somewhat eerie story – a story of coming and leaving, innocence and confidence, shadow and light, night and day, absence and connection, loss and longing, and not quite the past and not yet the future.
