Allen Frame: Innamorato

*limited quantity signed by Allen Frame

Innamorato collects three separate recent projects by Allen Frame into one book, all of them using photographs found in fleamarkets in Rome. In each piece, Frame features a large collection of vintage photographs pertaining to a single family or individual, and mixes in his own contemporary photographs and perspective to explore personal narratives suggested by the images.
 

Ennio includes pictures of four siblings in Italy in the late 1930s and early 40s, centered on the oldest brother, a pilot, his sister, and another pilot they may both be in love with. Two Sisters assembles photographs of two girls in the mid-1950s whose doting parents pose them in front of landmarks in Rome. Frame mixes in his own photographs of two adults in Florence today who may or may not be the same sisters reuniting. A third project, Piero, features vintage snapshots of one handsome young man in the late 1950s and 60s, posing on his boats or in the water with friends, along the Amalfi Coast. The artist juxtaposes these portraits of Piero with his own photographs of three young adults today, spending leisure time in similar locations, creating a link between the present and the past and animating the appropriated archive with his own seductive, cinematic images.

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, based in New York and represented by Gitterman Gallery, which, in 2022, has presented an exhibition of his black and white work from 1977-92.  Frame is a winner of the 2017/2018 Abigail Cohen Rome Prize in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome; CECArtslink’s Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2019; and was a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri in Italy in 2021.

He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including, most recently, Love and Jump Back, the Photography of Charles Henri Ford, at Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York, and Shohei Miyachi and Context at Matte HQ in Brooklyn. In 1996 he curated the first retrospective of the work of Darrel Ellis at Art in General in New York. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.