GoSee loves .... Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, presents 'White Shadow' surrealist disturbing portraits by Tono Stano

The New York Pace/MacGill Gallery presents 'White Shadow' – the first solo exhibition by Czech photographer Tono Stano in the United States. The exhibition features 20 gelatine silver prints of his surreal portrait series.

Tono Stano (born in 1960) studied photography under Milota Havránková in Bratislava. After photographing on film sets for one year, he enrolled at the FAMU in 1980, Prague's School of Film, photography & TV. Together with his fellow students, which included Vasil Stanko, Miro Svolík and Rudo Prekop (all of which gained fame as the so-called 'Slovak School), he produced dynamic and very imaginative photographs.

In 1991, he was invited by curator and art critic Anna Fárová to visit the studio of Czech photographer Josef Sudek (who died in 1976), whose last wish had been to make sure that his camera would fall into the hands of a deserving successor. Stano was awarded the equipment and Sudek's 24x30 large-format – the point of origin for his 'White Shadow' series, which he began to produce in the same year.

"I started to dream about taking a trip to a place where everything was in negative, so I could create a positive world on photographic paper, inside my new large-format camera.

My dream became a reality on the day I made up my mind to create that negative world in the confines of my studio. The lens captures that negative world on photographic paper. This process opened up a space new and unfamiliar to me, where nothing could be predicted, a bizarre space in between negative and positive, a white-shadowed world with an atmosphere we often find hard to accept."

If you are keen on finding out exactly how Stano's paper negatives are produced, the show provides a look behind the scenes. The exhibition will run until the 17th of March 2012.

Tono Stano’s works have been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions ever since 1984. His photographs can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie Paris, the Cologne Museum Ludwig or the National Media Museum Bradford.


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