Allen Frame

Frame’s images appear stripped down and radical in both their suspension of narrative drive and absence of overtly biographical impulses, yet they are deeply personal.
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Frame’s big, handsome color photographs of friends and lovers are not unlike the black-and-white images he’s shown previously; they’re subtle, intimate, and often quite dark, with a painterly feel for the chiaroscuro effects of shadow and light. But color, nearly always burnished by the sun, adds warmth to the work and draws us deeper into the circumscribed spaces he uses to frame his subjects. Most of them are alone in a dimly lit room, sometimes no more than silhouettes before a window, and even when they’re outdoors they appear delineated by landscape or architecture, in a style that recalls David Hockney. Frame also shares Hockney’s sense of casual refinement, but he adds a bright spark of erotic possibility to temper the darkness.