Also in her new series Fran Forman combines and manipulates, alter and fuse photographs with painting, reality with fiction – whatever it takes to tell the story. Each image is carefully constructed digitally over many weeks, compositing and assembling models (mostly non-professional), costumes, figures, objects, and settings, as if creating a stage set. Shadows and light, often digitally constructed, become major characters in the image.

"I think of each image as a still in a noir movie frame, that elusive and liminal moment between moments, requiring the viewer to wonder what’s next?"

As a former therapist, Fran Forman is acutely aware of the shadows that lie beneath the illusory sunny narrative of American life and the promise of ‘domestic tranquility. There is a sense of alienation, expectations and ambiguous relationships, longing, and disquiet within the domestic scene.

Fran Forman creates new and imagined staged scenes that integrate and juxtapose realism with illusion, villains with saints, longing with disconnection. Born of intuition, mood, and inspiration, her constructed images are suspended in vibrant fantasies that hint at ambiguity, at dual realities, yet always a slash of light offers a measure of hope.

Fran Forman held a succession of positions in the field of design, and was an art director at AOL Time Warner, where she designed the preeminent web site devoted to African American culture. Between professional life and raising her two daughters, Fran continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, and the dislocations of time and place.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Fran studied art and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and then received an MSW, working for several years with heroin addicts. She earned an MFA from Boston University in graphic design, but spent most of her grad school years experimenting in the darkroom.

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