Polaroid Color Photography

Village Motel Sunset (Stranger than Paradise) - 2005 20x20cm, sold out Edition of 5, Artist Proof 2/2 (the very last from this edition), Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, ...

'Forest Fire' part of the series 'A girl called N.' - 2019, 50x50cm, Edition 1/7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, digital C-Print based on a Polaroid, not mounted. Signed on the back and w...

Once we were Warriors (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 from the 29 Palms, CA project. 58x56cm, Edition 1/5. Analog C-Print hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Certifi...

A Wish (Circle of Magic) from the 29 Palms, CA project - 2009 57x70cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. digital C-Print based on a Polaroid Certificate and signature label. Art...

Stefanie Schneider's Minis Runaway (Haley and the Birds) - 2013 signed and signature brand on verso Lambda digital Color Photographs based on the Polaroid Polaroid sized open Editi...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid sized unlimited Mini 'Fairy (Heavenly Falls)' - 2016 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Archival Color Photograph based on the original Polaroid. Pola...

1 Stefanie Schneider Mini 'Self Portrait' - 1999 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Digital Color Photographs based on a Polaroid. Polaroid sized open Editions 1999-2016 10.7 x 8...

Stefanie Schneider's Minis Dr. Pepper (Oxana's 30th Birthday) - 2008 Signed and signature brand on verso. Lambda digital Color Photographs based on the Polaroid. Sandwiched in betwe...

Leaving Town (Sidewinder) - 2005 80x80cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 3...

Escapism - 2020 20x20cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, digital C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2020-922. Not mounte...

Orange Flowered Couch at Sunset (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 Edition 1/10, 20x20cm, Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid Artist inventory Number 19762 Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider:...

Windmills of your Mind (Heavenly Falls) - 2016 40x48cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist invent...

'Golden Brown' part of the series 'A girl called N.' - 2019 50x50cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid, Not mounted. Signature label and c...

Magic Mountain 12 (Memories of Green), Edition 1/5 , 58x56cm, 2003 analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on a Polaroid, Artist inventory Nu...

image size: 8 x 10 inches Young Nude Man in Bed Unique Polaroid Transfer on 22 x 15 inch Rives BFK paper, unframed signed SM Beard in pencil on bottom left...

Forlorn - 2021 50x50cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. Artist inventory PL2021-1032. Not ...

Blue Notes - 2018 Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, Archival C-print, based on the Polaroid, not mounted. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2018-431. ...

When would forever be a good time? part II (Till Death do us Part) - 2007, 20x24cm, Edition of 10, digital C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, ...

Daisy and Austen in front of Trailer (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 Proof b4 Printing / 128x125cm signed, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid, signed ...

The Betrayal - The Getaway (The Last Picture Show) - 1999 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist Inventory #723. ...

Wonderland - 2019 20x20 cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. Artist inventory PL2019 - 738. Kir...

Bath time Story IV - 2021 - 20x20cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, digital C-Print based on a Polaroid, Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2021-1069...

Tussle (The Princess and her Lover) - 2009 including Stefanie Schneider's new monograph "A Half Forgotten Dream" signed. 192 pages, hardcover, published by Snap Collective, 2024. ...

Whisky and Water (Sidewinder) - 2005 - diptych 30x50cm including the white border, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label an...

Think - 2021 48x40cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. Artist inventory PL2021-1015. Not mou...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid sized unlimited Mini 'The Muse' - 2009 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Digital Color Photographs based on a Polaroid. Polaroid sized open Editions ...

Lust for life- 2021 - 20x20cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, digital C-Print based on a Polaroid, Signed on the back and with certificate. Artis...

Cabazon Dinosaurs (Drive to the Desert) - 2000 44x59cm, Edition 5/5. Analog C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory #155.05. Not mount...

3 Stefanie Schneider Polaroid-sized unlimited Minis 'Radha Mind Screen' - 1999 - triptych signed in front, not mounted. 3 Digital Color Photographs based on the 3 Polaroids. 10.7...

The End of Love - Oxana's 30th Birthday (29 Palms, CA) - 2010 - Edition 1/10 , 20x24cm. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 4898.13. Sign...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid-sized unlimited Mini 'Hot Tub' (Heavenly Falls) - 2016 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Archival Color Photograph based on the Polaroid. Polaroid si...

'Untitled' Oilfields) - 2004, 60x60cm, Edition 4/10. Analog C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory #1212.04. Not mounted. ...

Matter of Time (Bombay Beach) - 2024 48x40cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. inventory P...

Moving in Together (Till Death do us Part) - Installation - 2008 Edition of 5. 16 analog C-Prints , hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on 13 Polaroids, ...

Revelation, 2016 Edition 1/7 plus 2 Artist Proofs Digital C-print, Based on Polaroid, not mounted. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2016-788 Kirsten Thy...

Almost Paradise (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 894. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. For sale is a piece from the Wastelands series. Reality with the Tequila: Stefanie Schneider’s Fertile Wasteland by James Scarborough “How much more than enough for you for I for both of us darling?” (E. E. Cummings) Until he met her, his destiny was his own. Petty and inconsequential but still his own. He was cocksure and free, young and unaccountable, with dark hair and aquiline features. His expression was always pensive, a little troubled, but not of a maniacal sort. He was more bored than anything else. With a heart capable of violence. Until she met him, she was pretty but unappreciated. Her soul had registered no seismic activity. Dustbowl weary, she’d yet to see better days. A languorous body, a sweet face with eyes that could be kind if so inclined. Until she met him, she had not been inclined. It began when he met her. She was struck in an instant by his ennui. The sum of their meeting was greater than the imbroglios and chicaneries of their respective existences. He was struck by the blank slate look in her eyes. They walked, detached and focused on the immediate, obscenely unaware of pending change across a terrain of mountainous desert, their eyes downcast and world-weary, unable to account for the buoyant feeling in her heart. His hard-guy shtick went from potentiality to ruse. The gun was not a weapon but a prop, a way to pass time. Neither saw the dark clouds massing on the horizon. They found themselves alone in the expanses of time, unaware of the calamity that percolated even as they posed like school kids for the pictures. Happiness brimmed in that wild terrain. Maybe things were beginning to look up. That’s when the shooting started… Stefanie Schneider assumes that our experience of lived reality (buying groceries, having a relationship with someone, driving a car) does not correspond to the actual nature of lived reality itself, that what we think of as reality is more like a margarita without the tequila. Stefanie Schneider’s reality is reality with the tequila. She does not abolish concepts that orient us, cause and effect, time, plot, and storyline, she just plays with them. She invites us to play with them, too. She offers us a hybrid reality, more amorphous than that with a conventional subject, verb, and predicate. Open-ended, this hybrid reality does not resolve itself. It frustrates anyone with pedestrian expectations but once we inebriate those expectations away, her work exhilarates us and even the hangover is good. An exploration of how she undermines our expectation of what we assume to be our lived reality, the reasons why she under- mines our expectations, and the end result, as posited in this book, will show how she bursts open our apparatus of perception and acknowledges life’s fluidity, its density, its complexity. Its beauty. She undermines expectations of our experience of reality with odd, other-worldly images and with startling and unexpected compressions and expansions of time and narrative sequence. The landscape seems familiar enough, scenes from the Old West: broad panoramic vistas with rolling hills dotted with trees and chaparral, dusty prairies with trees and shrubs and craggy rocks, close-up shots of trees. But they’re not familiar. These mis-en-scenes radiate an unsettling Picasso Blue Period glow or the intense celestial blue of the cafe skies that Van Gogh painted in the south of France. Yellow starbursts punctuate images as if seen through the viewfinder of a flying saucer. At the same time, objects appear both vintage and futuristic, the landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. Landscapes change seemingly at random as do the seasons. Stefanie Schneider offers no indication of how time flows here, except that it conceivably turns in on itself and then goes its merry way. Time is a river whose source is a deep murky spring which blusters about with an occasional swirling eddy. That Stefanie Schneider thwarts an easy reading is obvious but why does she do this? Since she will not countenance anything linear, logical, or sequential, and because she does not relish anything concrete and specific, she has to roil things up a bit. Nor does she seem comfortable with a book of images that is settled, discrete, and accountable. Instead she wants to create a panoply of anxious moments...

Illusions (Till Death Do Us Part) - 2005 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist ...

'Primary Colors' (Stranger than Paradise) - 2001 each 20x20cm plus 5 cm in between each print together, 70x70cm, sold out Edition of 10, Artist Proof 2/2, Archival C-Print print,...

image size: 10 x 8 inches Standing young nude male with dark background Polaroid Transfer on 22 x 15 inch Rives BFK paper, unframed signed SM Beard in pencil on bottom right corner....

Décadence - 2017 25 x 25 cm, edition of 10. Archival Print on Metal, based on a Polaroid. Hand-numbered and signed on the back by artist. Artist Statement “Since my childhood ...

In Other Words (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invent...

Buried (Stranger than Paradise) - 2003 Edition of 5 plus 2 Artist Proofs. 38x36cm each, 90x175cm installed. 8 Analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive P...

Wonder Valley (Sidewinder) - 2005 Edition of 5, 156x125cm. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 3094. Not mounted. "...

Shadow of the Woman I used to be #07, 2019 [Self-portrait from my series Need to be] Photo based on a original Polaroid. Authentic museum quality Diasec® TruLife mounted on Dibond...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid sized unlimited Mini 'Beachshoot' - 1999 signed in front, not mounted. 1 Digital Color Photograph based on a Polaroid. Polaroid sized open Editions 1...

Untitled (Paradise) - 1999, 98x97cm. Edition 3/10. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 20451. Not mounted. ...

'Angie' (Heavenly Falls) - 2016 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid from the making of the documentary "instant dreams". Certificate and signature labe...

Instructor (Suburbia) 2004, 20x24cm, Edition of 1/10, digital C-Print based on a Polaroid, not mounted, Signed on verso with Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 1680.01. This proje...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid-sized unlimited Mini 'Running with Guns' - 1999 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Digital Color Photographs based on a Polaroid. Polaroid sized open ...

Stefanie Schneider Polaroid sized unlimited Mini 'Long Way Home' - 1999 - signed in front, not mounted. 1 Digital Color Photographs based on a Polaroid. Polaroid sized open Edit...

More of This (Bombay Beach) - 2024 48x40cm, Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. inventory PL2...

In Bloom - 2022 50x50cm. Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival Print based on an original Polaroid on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper. Signature label and certificate. Not mo...

So Still (Sidewinder) - 2005 including Stefanie Schneider's new monograph "A Half Forgotten Dream" signed. 192 pages, hardcover, published by Snap Collective, 2024. 20x20cm, Edit...

Desert Junkyard II (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 58x56cm, Edition of 10 analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist based on the Polaroid Artist inventory #319.02 Mounted on Aluminum Dese...

Tales of Bitter Doom - 9 digital Prints, based on 9 Polaroids mounted on Dibond - gloss coating, 30x30cm each, installed 100x100cm, Edition 1/7, 2008. Hand signed & numbered on the back by artist This piece will be exhibited at the Bombay Beach Biennale in the newly founded Polaroid Museum in it's permanent collection. The Museum opens its doors in March 23rd, 2019. In Bombay Beach she presents a selection of nine scenes from the kinky Tales of Bitter Doom, a photo story about domination and submission, a tale about a wizard, as a Deus ex Machina...

The Tears we cried (Till Death do us Part) - 2007, 20x20cm, Edition of 10. Digital C-Print print, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 8583. N...

image size: 8 x 10 inches Standing Young Nude Man Polaroid Transfer on 22 x 15 inch Rives BFK paper, unframed signed SM Beard in pencil on bottom left corner. ed. 1/6 This is one i...

'Radha Leopard Dress III' (29 Palms, CA) Edition 3/10, 20x20cm, 1999, digital C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist inventory 18258.03. Not mounted. Featuring Australian actress Radha Mitchell. Living and working in Los Angeles and Berlin, Stefanie Schneider's scintillating situations take place in the American West. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines and a cast of phantasmic characters. Schneider works with the chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock. Chemical explosions of color spreading across the surfaces undermine the photograph's commitment to reality and induce her characters into trance-like dreamscapes. Like flickering sequences of old road movies Schneider's images seem to evaporate before conclusions can be made - their ephemeral reality manifesting in subtle gestures and mysterious motives. Schneider's images refuse to succumb to reality, they keep alive the confusions of dream, desire, fact, and fiction. Stefanie Schneider received her MFA in Communication Design at the Folkwang Schule Essen, Germany. Her work has been shown at the Museum for Photography, Braunschweig, Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin, the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt, the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Museum für Moderne Kunst Passau, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Foto -Triennale Esslingen. “It was Stefanie Schneider, who inspired me to start the company THE IMPOSSIBLE PROJECT after seeing her work, which seems to achieve the possible from the impossible, creating the finest of art out of the most basic of mediums and materials. Indeed, after that one day, I was so impressed with her photography that I realized Polaroid film could not be allowed to disappear. Being at the precise moment in time where the world was about to lose Polaroid, I seized the moment and have put all my efforts and passion into saving Polaroid film. For that, I thank Stefanie Schneider almost exclusively, who played a bigger role than anyone in saving this American symbol of photography.” –Florian Kaps, March 8th 2010 (“Doc” Dr. Florian Kaps, founder of “The Impossible Project”) Selected Exhibitions 2019 Participating and curating the newly founded Polaroid Museum at the Bombay Beach Biennale 2019 (G) invited project at Saatchi's The Other Art Fair, LA - Polaroid Curation Instant Dreams USA film release March/April NYC, L.A. 2018 participating and curating Bombay Beach Biennale 2018 (G) Rough Play Project, Available for all, Joshua, Tree, USA (G) 2017 BLICKFELD] Analoge Fotografie, Kommunale Galerie Steglitz-Zehlendorf (G) (catalog) Kunstverein Bad Homburg Artlantis, Bad Homburg (G)

 2016 
Instantdreams, Instantdreams Gallery, Berlin 

(S) 2015
 Desert Voices, De Re Gallery, Los Angeles (G) with Pamela Littky 
Blue Nudes, De Re Gallery, Los Angeles (G) 

 2014

 Summer Show, Galerie Catherine et André Hug, Paris, France (G) 6 Finalists, Saatchi Gallery London (G) 
Instantdreams, De Re Gallery, Los Angeles (S)
Grand Opening, De Re Gallery, Los Angeles (G) with Banksy, Andy Warhol, Alison Bignon, Sophie Dickens, Victor Gingembre and others
 2013 
Heather's Dream, Short, nominated for the German Short Film Award 2013 (Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis)
Images For Images (Artists fir Tichy), GASK - Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region,  Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, (G) with Richard Prince, Nan Golding, Shirana Shahbazi, Sophie Calle, Martin Kippenberger, Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Ruff, Katharina Grosse, Jonathan Meese & others (catalog) 
The Girl behind the White Picket Fence, Galerie Catherine et André Hug, Paris, France (S)
 Heather's Dream, Short, German Competition Short Film Festival Oberhausen 
Multimedia Presentation with Artist Stefanie Schneider, Palms Springs Art Museum, Annenberg Theater
 The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, (G) with Ansel Adams, Bruce Charlesworth, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Charles and Ray Eames, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Oppenheim, Andy Warhol and others, (catalog)
 Road Atlas - Straßenfotografie, DZ Bank Collection: Kunsthalle Erfurt (Spring), Art Foyer DZ Bank, Frankfurt/Main, (G) with Helen Levitt, Pieter Hugo, Nobuyoshi Araki, Pietro Donzelli, and others (catalog)  
2012
 Stranger Than Paradise, Christian Hohmenn Fine Art, Palms Desert, (S)
 Stefanie Schneider, Gallery at Cliff Lede Vineyards, Napa Valley, CA, (S)
 Bienale Art Auction 2012, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, (G), with Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Christo, Ed Ruscha, Christopher Russell... MUSES, Galerie Catherine et André Hug, Paris, France (G) 
Polaroid (IM)POSSIBLE - THE WESTLICHT COLLECTION, NRW Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, Düsseldorf (G), (catalog)
 Road Atlas - Straßenfotografie, DZ Bank Collection: Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk, Cottbus, (G), (catalog), 
Studio Scholorship, Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca, May 2012
 Selling Sex, ShowStudio Gallery, London (G) with Cortney Andrews, Una Burke, Liz Cohen, Inge Jacobsen, and others
 Stranger Than Paradise, Scott White Contemporary, San Diego, (S) 

2011 
Kunst zu verlosen !  // Art to raffle off !, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, (G) with Monica Bonvicini, Tim Eitel...

Asleep, 2020 50x50cm, Edition 1/7 plus 2 Artist Proofs, digital C-Print based on a Polaroid, not mounted. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory - PL2020-833. ...

Living in a Dream (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 9781. Not mounted. on offer is a piece from the movie "Till Death do us Part" Stefanie Schneider’s Till Death Do Us Part or “There is Only the Desert for You.” BY DREW HAMMOND Stefanie Schneider’s Til Death to Us Part is a love narrative that comprises three elements: 1. A montage of still images shot and elaborated by means of her signature technique of using Polaroid formats with outdated and degraded film stock in natural light, with the resulting im ages rephotographed (by other means) enlarged and printed in such a way as to generate further distortions of the image. 2. Dated Super 8 film footage without a sound track and developed by the artist. 3. Recorded off-screen narration of texts written by the actors or photographic subjects, and selected by the artist. At the outset, this method presupposes a tension between still and moving image; between the conventions about the juxtaposition of such images in a moving image presentation; and, and a further tension between the work’s juxtaposition of sound and image, and the conventional relationship between sound and image that occurs in the majority of films. But Till Death Do Us Part also conduces to an implied synthesis of still and moving image by the manner in which the artist edits or cuts the work. First, she imposes a rigorous criterion of selection, whether to render a section as a still or moving image. The predominance of still images is neither an arbitrary residue of her background as a still photographer—in fact she has years of background in film projects; nor is it a capricious reaction against moving picture convention that demands more moving images than stills. Instead, the number of still images has a direct thematic relation to the fabric of the love story in the following sense. Stills, by definition, have a very different relationship to time than do moving images. The unedited moving shot occurs in real time, and the edited moving shot, despite its artificial rendering of time, all too 2009often affords the viewer an even greater illusion of experiencing reality as it unfolds. It is self-evident that moving images overtly mimic the temporal dynamic of reality. Frozen in time—at least overtly—still photographic images pose a radical tension with real time. This tension is all the more heightened by their “real” content, by the recording aspect of their constitution. But precisely because they seem to suspend time, they more naturally evoke a sense of the past and of its inherent nostalgia. In this way, they are often more readily evocative of other states of experience of the real, if we properly include in the real our own experience of the past through memory, and its inherent emotions. This attribute of stills is the real criterion of their selection in Til Death Do Us Part where consistently, the artist associates them with desire, dream, memory, passion, and the ensemble of mental states that accompany a love relationship in its nascent, mature, and declining aspects. A SYNTHESIS OF MOVING AND STILL IMAGES BOTH FORMAL AND CONCEPTUAL It is noteworthy that, after a transition from a still image to a moving image, as soon as the viewer expects the movement to continue, there is a “logical” cut that we expect to result in another moving image, not only because of its mise en scène, but also because of its implicit respect of traditional rules of film editing, its planarity, its sight line, its treatment of 3D space—all these lead us to expect that the successive shot, as it is revealed, is bound to be another moving image. But contrary to our expectation, and in delayed reaction, we are startled to find that it is another still image. One effect of this technique is to reinforce the tension between still and moving image by means of surprise. But in another sense, the technique reminds us that, in film, the moving image is also a succession of stills that only generate an illusion of movement. Although it is a fact that here the artist employs Super 8 footage, in principle, even were the moving images shot with video, the fact would remain since video images are all reducible to a series of discrete still images no matter how “seamless” the transitions between them. Yet a third effect of the technique has to do with its temporal implication. Often art aspires to conflate or otherwise distort time. Here, instead, the juxtaposition poses a tension between two times: the “real time” of the moving image that is by definition associated with reality in its temporal aspect; and the “frozen time” of the still image associated with an altered sense of time in memory and fantasy of the object of desire—not to mention the unreal time of the sense of the monopolization of the gaze conventionally attributed to the photographic medium, but which here is associated as much with the yearning narrator as it is with the viewer. In this way, the work establishes and juxtaposes two times for two levels of consciousness, both for the narrator of the story and, implicitly, for the viewer: A) the immediate experience of reality, and B) the background of reflective effects of reality, such as dream, memory, fantasy, and their inherent compounding of past and present emotions. In addition, the piece advances in the direction of a Gesammtkunstwerk, but in a way that reconsiders this synaesthesia as a unified complex of genres—not only because it uses new media that did not exist when the idea was first enunciated in Wagner’s time, but also because it comprises elements that are not entirely of one artist’s making, but which are subsumed by the work overall. The totality remains the vision of one artist. In this sense, Till Death Do Us Part reveals a further tension between the central intelligence of the artist and the products of other individual participants. This tension is compounded to the degree that the characters’ attributes and narrated statements are part fiction and part reality, part themselves, and part their characters. But Stefanie Schneider is the one who assembles, organizes, and selects them all. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS IDEA (above) AND PHOTOGRAPHY This selective aspect of the work is an expansion of idea of the act of photography in which the artistic photographer selects that which is already there, and then, by distortion, definition or delimitation, compositional and lighting emphasis, and by a host of other techniques, subsumes that which is already there to transform it into an image of the artist’s contrivance, one that is no less of the artist’s making than a work in any other medium, but which is distinct from many traditional media (such as painting) in that it retains an evocation of the tension between what is already there and what is of the artist’s making. Should it fail to achieve this, it remains, to that degree, mere illustration to which aesthetic technique has been applied with greater or lesser skill. The way Til Death Do Us Part expands this basic principle of the photographic act, is to apply it to further existing elements, and, similarly, to transform them. These additional existing elements include written or improvised pieces narrated by their authors in a way that shifts between their own identities and the identities of fictional characters. Such characters derive partially from their own identities by making use of real or imagined memories, dreams, fears of the future, genuine impressions, and emotional responses to unexpected or even banal events. There is also music, with voice and instrumental accompaniment. The music slips between integration with the narrative voices and disjunction, between consistency and tension. At times it would direct the mood, and at other times it would disrupt. Despite that much of this material is made by others, it becomes, like the reality that is the raw material of an art photo, subsumed and transformed by the overall aesthetic act of the manner of its selection, distortion, organization, duration, and emotional effect. * * * David Lean was fond of saying that a love story is most effective in a squalid visual environment. In Til Death Do Us Part, the squalor of the American desert...