Brooklyn Museum: Photography: Robin, #43, Oakland, CA

00:26 04/14/2009

beautiful image, it has the feeling of a painting but the delicate light of a photo.

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Robin, #43, Oakland, CA

Adolescence has become ubiquitous subject matter in contemporary photography. Whether it is the awkwardness of Rineke Dijkstra’s gangly prepubescents or the sexuality, malaise, and dysfunction depicted by Larry Clark, the worlds of adolescents and teenagers seem to have been exhaustively described.

While Lise Sarfati continues to mine this rich vein of subject matter, she evokes a slightly different tone. In her first book of photographs, Acta Est, she documented the dark, emotional territory of wayward youth in post-Soviet Russia. Robin, #43, Oakland, CA is from her subsequent project, titled The American Series. Published in book form as The New Life, the series comprises images of young people from Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon, and California. Directionless, dispossessed, and dejected, these young people (mainly young women) appear ghost-like and unattached to their surroundings. Sarfati’s subjects transcend their social, political, or cultural categories; as carriers of individual, as well as universal, psychological states, they represent the interstitial space between inertia and movement.

In Robin, #43, Oakland, CA, the young woman gazes into a backyard hidden from view. Framed by the intersecting lines of backyard fences bathed in a saturated cyan light, Robin may sit firmly on her home soil, but she is emotionally unmoored from it.

Artist: Lise Sarfati, French, born 1958
Medium: Chromogenic print
Dates: 2003
Dimensions: Sheet: 16 x 21 in. (40.6 x 53.3 cm)
Collections: Photography
Museum Location: This item is not on view
Accession Number: 2006.64.2
Edition: Edition 2 of 10
Credit Line: Gift of Kenneth H. Schweber
Rights Statement: © Lise Sarfati
The Brooklyn Museum holds a non-exclusive license to reproduce images of this work of art from the rights holder named here.

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Caption: Lise Sarfati (French, born 1958). Robin, #43, Oakland, CA, 2003. Chromogenic print, Sheet: 16 x 21 in. (40.6 x 53.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Kenneth H. Schweber, 2006.64.2. © Lise Sarfati
Image: overall, 2006.64.2_PS2.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2008
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don't yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.

Record Completeness: Best (83%)
Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.

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Collections: Photography: Robin, #43, Oakland, CA