Continuing through July 18, 2026
Among Mona Kuhn’s ten black and white and two-color photographs in “A Love Affair,” only two are nudes, marking a pointed deviation from the previous work for which she is best known. The new photographs are seductive and delightfully creepy, looking like captures of an unquiet spirit haunting the nocturnal hallways of a forlorn mansion. The rest feature the same figure in other guises, namely face shots and clothed figures, all captured in an ethereal dream space that makes them look like phantoms. The model for these images is always the same, although from image to image she often seems quite different owing to changes in hairstyle, make-up and lighting.
What causes them to seem so ethereal? The answer lies in the use of solarized printing techniques of the kind pioneered by Lee Miller and Man Ray almost a century ago, in some cases set up to create a collage effect. Even though Kuhn’s works are all presented in editions of 7, they read like monoprints that display subtle variations from image to image. Each is indicated as a “variation” on the exhibition’s checklist. And when I refer to solarization, I do not mean the filter of the same name in the popular digital image-editing programs like Photoshop. That filter can do many things, but it can’t highlight the unruly grain of the photograph. Because of that, it can’t make them look different from current print and electronic media’s stage-managing and sanitizing everyday images. Pre-digital solarization techniques were more limited, but are so arcane in appearance that they always look improbably uncanny, especially now that we see them so rarely. Rarer still are the instances when we see them used to such great effect, as is the case with Kuhn’s “Love Affair” images.
The forlorn residence that Kuhn’s ghostly figures inhabit is an important part of the backstory of these works. The Schindler House on King’s Road in West Hollywood, originally built by Austrian-born Rudolf Schindler as a neo-Bauhaus testament to the integration of the natural and built environments. The exhibition’s press release tells us that during her research into the Schindler house, Kuhn discovered a cache of letters written by Schindler addressed to an unnamed lover, prompting the artist to imagine the way that her memory might have haunted the house that he lived in until his death in 1953. There you have it: old Hollywood haunted by an older Europe in an airy house reflecting the flickering lights of the tinsel town dream factory.
In addition to the ten black and white photographs, all figurative, the two larger color images present the house in its pristine modernist guise — all glass and sharp geometry greeting the waning outside light before the ghosts arrive. Is the house a prison of eternally recursive reflections referring to each other, a crystalline way station in the picture forest of signs? Kuhn’s photographs see it that way, and it’s a very different way than Schindler would have imagined his house to be. But without documentary evidence we will never know for sure.
Stylistically, the solarized images do conjure several collisions in the modernist history of photography, in particular the collision between French Surrealism, Berlin Dada and Russian Constructivism. They are very Weimar Republic Mitteleuropäisch (Central European), with the featured female protagonist usually looking like a Neue Sachlichkeit femme fatale, or possibly a late-Expressionsit vampire pulled out of a F.W. Murnau casting call. Kuhn’s interpretation errs on the side of being overly referential of the Hollywood source, their familiarity thus diluting the emotional power of the images. But her self-conscious historicism also adds to that power because it gives us a story to attach to them. And with that story comes another familiar one, of photography’s vampiric theft of the souls of its subjects and viewers alike, casting all in the limbo of frozen apparitions crying out for the salvation brought on by the recognition of desire.
