The artist Linda Fregni Nagler will be hosted at Moderna Museet in Stockholm to present Things that Death Cannot Destroy, the seventh chapter of a performance featuring 19th-century magic lanterns. The magic lantern was the forerunner of the film projector and was used to project images on walls at the end of the 19th century. Viewers are driven through time by means…
Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother
Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler’s book The Hidden Mother collects 1.002 children portraits – tintypes, ambrotypes, snapshots, daguerreotypes, cartes de visite and cabinet cards – taken between the advent of photography and the 1920’s by mostly anonymous authors. At the time the photographs were taken, because of the slow exposure times, babies needed to be…
By Appointment Only. Francesco Zanot visits the collection of Linda Fregni Nagler
For his first Fantom incursion into photography collections, critic and curator Francesco Zanot visited artist Linda Fregni Nagler’s peculiar selection of old tintypes, magic lantern glass slides, gelatin prints and more… The 9 images presented hereafter were chosen and extensively captioned by both; technically, symbolically, historically, emotionally and carefully. HIDDEN MOTHER. The presentation of the subject In this old tintype, behind a typical portrait of a baby we see the outline of an individual hiding underneath a dark cloth. The function of this individual corresponds to the function of every photograph: it introduces the spectator to what has to be…