Klompching Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of vintage Ilfochromes by Frederic Weber.

Frederic Weber brings to his photographic practice, a visual sensibility that challenges the viewer to determine quite what they’re looking at. On show are selections from two bodies of work, Memento Mori and Primary Light, both of which draw attention to Weber’s penchant for making photographs that don’t always look like photographs.

Memento Mori is constructed from a combination of images, that the artist has excavated from comic books, magazines, newspapers, television, paintings and other printed matter. He presents images of tightly cropped heads of black and African subjects, presenting them almost as relics of a time past. The photographs are challenging, almost visually overwhelming, and difficult to fix within a specific framework. At once iconic, they echo historical post-mortem imagery, with a timestamp that is not fixed or even knowable. Made of several layers of different images, the photographs are rich in color and painterly.

The Primary Light series share this painterly quality. Here though, it is the reference to photography’s Pictorialism past, that is most evident. Weber presents torsos and heads that are rendered in soft-focus, with each emerging from a depth of blue so saturated, the color transforms into an abyss, out of which the human forms glow like fire-flies. The ghostly figures seem nostalgic, classical even and partly unknowable.

Both bodies of work by Frederic Weber are produced as Ilfochromes, a photographic process introduced in the 1960s, that is well known for its rich highly-saturated colors. The prints on display are vintage, making this a rare opportunity to view this work as originally envisioned and printed.

FREDERIC WEBER lives and works in Nyack, NY. His photographs have been reproduced in several publications including Art + Auction, Aperture, Flash Art, The New Yorker, The New York Times and more recently, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection (Aperture, 2011). Weber’s artworks are represented in several museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the George Eastman House, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as many private collections.