ABOUT

“Drawing from the male-dominated history of “straight photography,” Matalon’s images have a seductive clarity that evokes how our perceptions are sharpened in the excitement of an erotic encounter, and how those encounters are packaged and marketed back to us. But the intimacy being proffered by the subject or conjured by Matalon is rarely explicitly sexual, but rather quiet, vulnerable, tenderly perverse, akin to the tentative probing of someone seeking intimacy rather than a confident recounting of conquests by someone who has found it. The photos are a reciprocal performance: the chance for Matalon to create a close atmosphere with a subject under the pretext of a photo, and a chance for that subject to express their hope to be desired by a future audience. It is a collection less about the friction of bodies, which are often formally isolated in Matalon’s compositions, than the vivid and vivifying frisson of encounter.” – Nich McElroy