Sandra Klein

(b. 1946, Elizabeth, NJ. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA)


Meeting the Shadow

Shadow is subject in Sandra Klein’s photographs. The images begin as straightforward photos made in her garden or neighborhood—flowers: fresh, fading, or fallen. She then deconstructs them. She erases, excises, leaves only the shadow, the fleeting, the ephemeral. “As I sit in my garden, I watch life become more and more fragmented—the pandemic, politics, issues of race and ethnicity, personal losses, all contribute to an unhinged surrealism. The beauty and decay among the verdure serve as a metaphor for this new world.”


The work is directly connected to this shadowed era. But it looks forward as well. Each image emerges from a slow, meditative process—many hours, sometimes days at the computer. And the results of the journey are unknowable until the artist arrives. Some images work, others fail and are abandoned. Klein has also been reading Carl Jung. The shadow is your unknown, unconscious side. There is danger in rejecting it.