Anne Messner’s photographs are wide bands of information; they detail a deluxe version of reality, one step removed, and angled in such a way as to further distance the viewer’s perspective from that of a static machine or window. Many of her candid photographs surrounds audiences in stadiums, on streets, or in other circumstances that draw large groups of people together; contrastingly, she photographs single figures in lonesome, stagnant environments, as if to memorialize the polarities of human interaction that remain possible within a bustling metropolis.
A Love Story highlights Messner’s photographic sensitivities in several ways, most notably its wide format and interspersed blank, black pages; these additions provide an important pause between the sweeping gestures of humanity and architecture, mimicking a cinematic technique used to splice two moving images together in juxtaposition and/or comparison of one another.
