Cali Clair - Obscur

Cali clair-obscur is the catalogue for the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain's retrospective of the Colombian photographer Fernell Franco (1942-2006), gathering four decades of his black-and-white and hand-worked prints of the city of Cali.

Franco trained as a photojournalist before turning his camera on Cali's demolition sites, cheap hotels, and sex workers, work he routinely reprinted, cropped, and hand-tinted afterward rather than treating the negative as a finished object. This 291-page bilingual (French/English) volume, published by the Fondation Cartier in 2016 and edited by Maria Wills Londoño, includes a text by the Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz.

Franco moved in the loose circle of Cali artists and filmmakers around Andrés Caicedo and Luis Ospina in the 1970s and 80s, a scene later nicknamed Caliwood. This catalogue, produced for his retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, was among the first major European surveys of his photographic work.