EXHIBITIONS \  Thomas Zanon-Larcher \  Turning the Season - Scenes from a contemporary marriage

The photographs in Turning the Season were shot in the summer of 2008 and co-authored by Thomas Zanon-Larcher (photographer) and Jules Wright (director). They set out to make a work which captured the English Season, a time of year when the English aristocracy and upper-middle-class traditionally (since the Restoration in the 17th century) go out to play at horse racing, polo,. cricket, car racing, picnicking and dining. For the purposes of this take on Englishness, the co-authors constructed a relationship between a young married couple, Alice who suffers from bi-polar disorder and Alex, a successful lawyer. We watch them struggle to survive within the public world imposed by their class. Turning the Season was staged as an installation at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, 21 November 2008- 28 February 2009. All work was shot on film on location and in public. The photographs are hand printed by Thomas Zanon-Larcher.

These photographs belong to Zanon-Larcher’s narrative work, a cycle of photographic stories, in which nothing is staged formally. Working closely with performers as if shooting a movie, Zanon-Larcher sets up role plays. Loosely shaped stories founded in the traditions of Hollywood film noir, French Nouvelle Vague or classic texts such as Ibsen’s The Doll’s House or Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage may be the starting point. On set, usually the street or a public place, using available light, amidst sometimes hundreds of passers-by, Zanon-Larcher shoots at the precise moment when the essence of the unfolding drama can be captured in a single frame – the gestus – when emotion, thought and gesture unify in a unique moment. Caught in an instant of pensive solitude, his protagonists are on the move, frequently in conflict.

With these works, Zanon-Larcher continues his ongoing interest in performance, artifice and the construction of female identity in visual culture, which he has already explored in depth in his backstage work within the fashion industry. This has led him to collaborate with Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen, Dries van Noten, Martin Margiela and Haider Ackerman, amongst others: designers who broadly eschew conventional expressions of female identity or at least challenge it. There is a clear link between this and Turning the Season – the shots are constructed as narratives with models caught unawares and unposed. Zanon Larcher’s work has been exhibited at Mode Museum, Antwerp, and The Leonardo da Vinci Museum Milan as well as in galleries in Warsaw, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Born in Italy, Zanon-Larcher studied structural engineering in Innsbruck and worked as an engineer. He has a fascination for the physics and machinery of photography. He came to the UK in 2000. Zanon-Larcher has had solo exhibitions in major galleries and museums in Tokyo, Warsaw, Milan, Antwerp and London. His work is distinguished by both un-staged and narrative images which capture his protagonists’ isolation, often fixing moments of introspection and solemnity as they turn or move away from the camera.