Thy Trần fills her photos with human bodies, but they are immediately and deliberately impersonal. Extensive staging, concealing, and cropping reduce her models to figures. Unremarkable, domestic settings – walls, beds, floors, curtains – fill out the frame. Her equipment, a 35mm film camera with an occasional mounted flash, further distorts and downplays the particulars of settings. This conservatism leaves hardly any accessible content besides bodies and forms. Exposed, contorted figures arouse but do not satisfy our curiosity. If the photos are intimate, this intimacy is not extended to us. The stories that typically inspire and explain the snapshot aesthetic are excavated. Revealing and concealing are central to her work, and are used to engage us with actively suggestive bodies, without any pretense of having captured the person in front of the lens. (Kevin Knuepfer)
