Innamorato

 “Frame opens spaces by assuming the tone of the absent narrator. He immerses himself in the eyes of others. Steeped in this immersion, his works have a density that nevertheless seems fragile and tenuous. Their details matter. A subtle shift or juxtaposition can point to an important prompt in the reading. He likes to feel that his images are full of those who made them possible.”

Samuel Gross for Innamorato

Innamorato collects three separate recent projects by Allen Frame into one book, all of them using photographs found in fleamarkets in Rome. In each piece, Frame features a large collection of vintage photographs pertaining to a single family or individual, and mixes in his own contemporary photographs and perspective to explore personal narratives suggested by the images.
Ennio includes pictures of four siblings in Italy in the late 1930s and early 40s, centered on the oldest brother, a pilot, his sister, and another pilot they may both be in love with. Two Sisters assembles photographs of two girls in the mid-1950s whose doting parents pose them in front of landmarks in Rome. Frame mixes in his own photographs of two adults in Florence today who may or may not be the same sisters reuniting. A third project, Piero, features vintage snapshots of one handsome young man in the late 1950s and 60s, posing on his boats or in the water with friends, along the Amalfi Coast. The artist juxtaposes these portraits of Piero with his own photographs of three young adults today, spending leisure time in similar locations, creating a link between the present and the past and animating the appropriated archive with his own seductive, cinematic images.