“ALMOST ALL MY IMAGES have to do with relationships, with connections—human to her environment or natural world, humans to each other, humans to historical events,” says Fran Forman, an affiliated scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Forman takes pieces of her photographs and reconstructs them into surreal narratives, a technique called photomontage, or photo-painting. In Les Sauvages (The Savages), she found the bear and coyote at a taxidermist in Brattleboro, Vermont. She came across the deer and heron in the wild. The background was photographed in the Berkshires, and the tutu was from Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at the Clark Art Institute. The girl was a volunteer in a class Forman taught in Cape Cod. “Humans see bears and coyotes as savage creatures,” says Forman, “yet they are reaching out to the girl.” Forman regularly visits the Berkshires and will be in residence this fall at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. She is represented by Sohn Fine Art in Lenox (sohnfineart.com) and will hold a webinar on June 5 with the Los Angeles Center for Photography (lacphoto.org). Her latest book is The Rest Between Two Notes.
—Anastasia Stanmeyer
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