"These days girls don’t leave anything to the imagination, but the discreet charm of Flavia Sollner’s photography harkens back to the olden days when less was more and a subject didn’t have to show pubic hair to get noticed. Sollner’s photographs utilize the lost arts of mystery and allure that is all but absent in the current climate of over-exposed, Juergen Teller and American Apparell campaigns. Using nighttime as a veil, Sollner strategically lifts the darkness to show us the mysterious goings-on of her dark fancy: a flash over the shoulder-blade of a half-naked boy, carlights over the frozen ridges of a country road, dawn over troubled water. And although her work is very cinematic and even sinister, it is often described as “fairy-tale’.  This fairy-tale connection is apparent in the titles of So As I Might See You Better and In the Company of Wolves, however they echo the tales of the Grimms and H.C. Andersen in little else. For example, Tale of Our Purloined Breath has more in common with stills from a Cohen Brothers thriller than an Angela Carter story. Suspense and fear permeate these photos as much as any magic.


Brazilian-Bred and Norweigian-Raised, she simultaneously evokes the overgrown rainforests of Belem (where the Amazon meets the ocean) and the stark darkness of the Oslo wintertime (where the sun barely rises in January). 


Infact, a large part of the intrigue of her work lies in that neither-nor netherworld where tropical meets frigid and girl meets boy.  It’s the oldest story in the world, one of opposites attracting, repelling, loving and fighting.


And it’s this distinctive tone of epic yet private conflict in her work and practice that have garnered much attention over the last year as her photographs and interviews have appeared in Marie Claire Italia, Zoe Magazine, WeltKunst, Image Magazine and Soup. She’s also enjoyed a fair bit of exposure via the exhibition racket at the Year ’07 Art Fair here in London’s City Hall, Mi Art! in Milan, Close to Dark in Venice and an upcoming show in New York City at Galerie Poller. So it seems that Sollner’s photography has certainly struck and sucked in fans and collectors alike in the already oversaturated world of photography. And although it’s taken restraint and skill to court the crowd, Sollner understands that there’s no pleasure in the immediate gratification of flashy sensationalism. She echoes the wisdom and advice of old-wives and Bobby Womack when she says in an interview, “you must leave them wanting more”. To see the rest of Sollner’s creepy and crafted photography, go to: www.flaviasollner.com"


Sophia Al-Maria


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