This recent exhibition of Susan Fenton’s painted photographs presented two bodies of work, one produced in France and one in Japan, where the artist is now living. Place has always been a factor in Fenton’s work, a subtext that underlies the immediately apparent subject matter and marks the extent of her experience in foreign places. The artist’s first important work evolved while she was living in Rome—the city became a source for the ritualized, ceremonial attitudes of her figures and the objects that accompany them.

Fenton’s general practice consists first of a highly controlled studio