Tania Franco Klein

Tania Franco Klein (born 1990) is a Mexican artist whose practice centers on photography.

Her work examines modern forms of isolation, performance, and emotional disconnection in an age of hyperconnectivity, often through cinematic self-portraiture staged in ambiguous domestic or roadside settings.

Her photographs are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).

Early life and education Franco Klein was born in Mexico City in 1990. She studied architecture at Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City (2009–2013), where she first experimented with photography. She later earned a master’s degree in photography from the University of the Arts London (2016). This body of work was published in 2019 by Éditions Bessard as Positive Disintegration.

In 2018, Franco Klein began Proceed to the Route, titled after a GPS command when users stray off course. Artforum listed the show among its Picks, and critic Annabel Osberg later named it one of Los Angeles’s top ten exhibitions of 2020.

In 2021, she collaborated with Time magazine to photograph survivors of the Andrés Roemer abuse case; one portrait was selected as one of Time’s Best Portraits of 2021. Her first New York solo exhibition, Long Story Short (2024), opened at Yancey Richardson Gallery. She was later featured in Looking Forward: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography (2022–23). In 2025, she was included in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art, marking the 40th anniversary of the series.

Selected exhibitions Solo exhibitions 2016 – Our Life in the Shadows, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City 2018 – Our Life in the Shadows, Photo London, Somerset House, London 2019 – Proceed to the Route, RoseGallery, Santa Monica (Bergamot Station Arts Center) 2024 – Long Story Short, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City

Publications Books by Tania Franco Klein Positive Disintegration. By Tania Franco Klein. Paris: Éditions Bessard, 2019. . Shortlisted for the 2019 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Book Award. Mercado de Sonora. By Tania Franco Klein. Mexico City: Luhz Press, 2025. .

Books and catalogs featuring her work Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph. Edited by Jason Fulford. New York: Aperture, 2021. . Face Time: A History of the Photographic Portrait. By Phillip Prodger. London / New York: Thames & Hudson, 2021. . Her Dior: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s New Voice. New York: Rizzoli, 2021. . Queer Formalism: The Return. By William J. Simmons. Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2022. . Looking Forward: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography. San Francisco: Pier 24 Photography / Pilara Family Foundation, 2022. Photo Book Photo List. By Christopher McCall. San Francisco: Pier 24 Photography, 2023.

Style and themes Franco Klein combines architectural composition with cinematic lighting and performative gesture. W Magazine noted that she constructs sets, alters locations, and stages scenes that resemble film stills—an approach she describes as “creating tableaux.” Her subjects—often herself or solitary figures—inhabit liminal spaces between public and private, reality and performance. Musée Magazine and the Financial Times describe these environments as charged with “cinematic dread,” with the female figure becoming a vessel for contemporary anxiety. J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles) Shortlisted for the 2019 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Book Award. Included in Time magazine’s Best Portraits of 2021. Selected for New Photography 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.