Landscape Color Photography

From Debranne Cingari's "Words in the Sky" series, this piece celebrates the playfulness that has long been a signature element of her oeuvre. Cingari combines beautiful landscapes, ...

Anguilla Beach Resort 1992 C-print Estate stamped and hand numbered edition of 150 with certificate of authenticity from the estate. Holidaymakers on the mile-long crescent beach at the Hotel Cap Jaluca resort, Anguilla, Leeward Islands...

Il Pellicano Pool - Mediterranean Waters and Natural Scenery off Tuscan Coast, a portrait of the verdant landscape in Italy by Slim Aarons 16 x 20" print. Limited Edition Estate Sta...

Mike BRODIE (*1985, USA) #0924, from the series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, 2006-2009 C-Print Sheet 43,18 x 60,96 cm (17 x 24 in.) Edition of 7, plus 3 AP; Ed. no. 3/7 About Mike Brodie: Claiming inspiration from “old-school American values mixed with a little punk-rock idealism,” Mike Brodie, aka The Polaroid Kidd, hopped trains across the U.S. for seven years, documenting his friends, lovers, and travels with a Polaroid and a 35-millimeter camera and amassing a critically acclaimed body of images. Like a 21st-century Jack Kerouac, replacing pen with pictures, Brodie rode the railways with a motley crew...

'Pebble Beach' Riders from the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center wend their way through the Californian sand dunes and pampas grass, November 1976. 20x20" inches / 51 x 51 cm paper s...

Edition of 25 Additional sizes available

West Texas: Ocotillo in Bloom, Mule Ears Peaks, Big Bend National Park by Peter Brown is listed 13 1/2 x 20 inch archival pigment print, with the paper size as 18 x 22 inches. This photograph is signed and numbered in black ink on print margin by Peter Brown. This size is available in an edition of 25, with more sizes available. This photograph is from Peter Brown series, Hometown Texas. West Texas: Ocotillo in Bloom by Peter Brown depicts a desert landscape lit by the setting sun, with the Mule Ears Peaks at Big Bend National Park in the background. Peter Brown attended Stanford University (BA English, MFA Photography) and has taught in the art departments at Rice and at Stanford. He has exhibited and published his work widely. His photographic awards include the Dorothea Lange – Paul Taylor Prize (with Kent Haruf) from the Duke Center for Documentary Studies; an Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for a photo-essay published in DoubleTake; an Imogen Cunningham Award for his portfolio Seasons of Light; a graduate fellowship from the Carnegie Foundation; an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Artist’s Grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and a publication grant from the Graham Foundation. His book On the Plains won the Fred Whitehead Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He presently is photographing the Llano Estacado of Texas and New Mexico under a grant from the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University and the central high plains in a collaboration with the novelist Kent Haruf. His book with Haruf, West of Last Chance, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2008. His photographs are in many public, private, university and corporate collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection in Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Stanford University Museum of Art, the Rice University Collection, The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas Austin, the Sheldon Museum at the University of Nebraska, the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas, the Snipe Museum at Notre Dame, and the University of Kentucky Museum of Art, among many others. His work has been exhibited in one man and group shows in museums and galleries in this country and abroad. Among others: The Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first book Seasons of Light, consisted of photographs of interior scenes with Brown’s short prose pieces, and was published with an afterword and poetry by Denise Levertov by Rice University Press in 1988. It was excerpted in American Photographer. His second, On The Plains, dealt with the open landscape and small towns of the western plains. Published with an introduction by Kathleen Norris by W.W. Norton, On the Plains was excerpted in DoubleTake, LIFE, The New Yorker, Aperture and Texas Monthly. His forthcoming book West of Last Chance, will be excerpted in Harpers, Texas Monthly and 5280. His work has also appeared in Dwell, House and Garden, Landscape Architecture, Duke, Stanford, Popular Photography, American Photographer, FotoMetro, Southwest Art, American Cowboy and other magazines - as well as on the covers of books by Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley...

David Burdeny 12 Giraffes, Maasai Mara, Kenya, Africa, 2019 Archival Pigment Print Signature Label Framed. Ask us for framing options.

Aspen Study II by Frank Schott a series of images capturing the yellow golden Indian summer foliage palette of aspen trees in California's Sierra Nevada ...

large scale photograph of an epic view of the iconic Hollywood sign and sprawling downtown Los Angeles in the distance HOLLYWOOD by Christian Stoll 40 x 40 inches / 102 x 102cm si...

large scale photograph of an epic view of the iconic Hollywood sign and sprawling downtown Los Angeles in the distance HOLLYWOOD by Christian Stoll 40 x 40 inches / 102 x 102cm si...

Cowboy TV by Frank Schott 58 x 77.25 inches ( 147 x 196cm ) signed edition of 7 48 x 64 inches (122 x 162cm) signed edition of 7 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102cm) signed edition of 25 archival fine art pigment print signed & numbered by artist on certificate label _____________________________________ Frank Schott grew up in Germany and attended the prestigious Academy of Arts in Cologne, studying under Professor Arno Jansen, who was an early influence. Moving to California in 1998, Schott's work has evolved to include the epic landscapes and deserts of the American West as well as architectural, conceptual and more formal environments from both home and his travels. Influenced by a number of photographic peers and precursors such as Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Ed Rusha...

Black and white fine art panorama long exposure waterscape - landscape photography. Lake side winter panorama with mountains, lake and beautiful reflections in the water, Almsee, Aus...

All that Remains - 2016 Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on a Polaroid. Not mounted. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2016-3...

Rodrigo Katayama Nature Abstraction #17, Mendoza (Color Abstract Photography) 71 x 48 inches Edition of 5 Archival Pigment Print Unframed

large scale original photograph of vintage TV set with iconic western movie in American wild west landscape Cowboy TV by Frank Schott is available in three edition sizes: 48 x 64 inches (122 x 162cm) signed edition of 7 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102cm) signed edition of 25 58 x 77.25 inches (148 x 148cm) signed edition of 7 archival fine art pigment print signed & numbered by artist on certificate label _____________________________________ Frank Schott grew up in Germany and attended the prestigious Academy of Arts in Cologne, studying under Professor Arno Jansen, who was an early influence. Moving to California in 1998, Schott's work has evolved to include the epic landscapes and deserts of the American West as well as architectural, conceptual and more formal environments from both home and his travels. Influenced by a number of photographic peers and precursors such as Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Ed Rusha...

Color fine art long exposure waterscape - landscape photography. Archival pigment ink print as part of a limited edition of 8. All Gerald Berghammer prints are made to order in limit...

Dominique TEUFEN (*1975, Switzerland) Midsummer Night, from the series 'Rays of Light', 2019 Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta Sheet 80 x 120 cm (31 1/2 x 47 1/4 in.) Frame 91 x 130 x 4 cm ...

Snowy Mountains and Outdoors Winter Nature Scenery, a view of the snowy city of Lech 16 x 20" print. Limited Edition Estate Stamped Print. Edition of 150. Printed Later. "Main Stre...

The Tree of Life - 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 #35...

Strata VI is a limited-edition diptych photograph by contemporary artist Luca Marziale. This photograph is sold unframed as a print only. It is available in 2 sizes: *76.2 cm × 152...

Clearly, the most beautiful time to be in Central Park is during the Autumn when leaves turn from green to vibrant golds, rich browns, saturated reds, and warm dreamy yellows. This ...

Large format photograph of a billboard signage in California desert landscape, from a series of conceptual motivational messages on iconic Americana roadside signs and billboards cap...

Photographed by Richard Heeps in Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, California. The combination of the suns rays intersecting the horizon, and the silhouette of the tree unexpectedly rising o...

Unghia Marina 1989 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition A group of people stand on a terrace, at the Unghia Marina on the island of Capri, Italy, in September 1989. T...

Color fine art landscape photography. Archival pigment ink print as part of a limited edition of 8. All Gerald Berghammer prints are made to order in limited editions on Hahnemuehle ...

Aditya Dicky Singh Untitled Infrared photograph on fine-art Hahnemuhle archival paper, 64" x 42.7" *please note this artwork can be printed at any size so long as the ratio remain...

Towards Rock Hill, photographed by Richard Heeps in Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, California. The combination of the suns rays intersecting the horizon, and the silhouette of the tree un...

large scale original photograph of vintage television set with iconic western movie in American Wild West landscape Cowboy TV by Frank Schott ( framed ) 58 ...

North Shore Mirage (California Badlands) - 2008 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory #18078 Not mo...

'Death Valley Road' from Richard Heeps 'Sundance Series', these artworks are a development of traditional landscape photographs and they have created a unique perspective as if captu...

My Literature - Signed limited edition archival pigment print, Edition of 3 Signed + numbered by artist with certificate of authenticity , unframed This is an Archival Pigment print...

Valley Vista (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 864. 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...

Untitled (Oilfields), 2004 60x60cm, Proof b4 Printing, Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid, signed in front. Artist Inventory No. 1208. Not...

'Moab Memories', 2017, Edition 2/7 plus 2 Artist Proofs Based on an original Polaroid, Digital C-print, not mounted. Signed on the back and with certificate. Artist inventory PL2017-...

Meyerowitz first drew acclaim for his remarkable ability to capture subtlequalities of light with the 1978 publication of Cape Light, which went on to become a color photography classic, selling more than 130,000 copies. This evocative new collection of images and commentary invites readers to experience the essence of Tuscany; sunlight gilding fields of ripe wheat, darkness lowering under threatening summer skies, and townspeople riding their bicycles through the dappled streets. For those who appreciate the beauty of the Italian landscape and for lovers of photography everywhere,Tuscany is a personal and loving portrait of a truly unforgettable place.Joel Meyerowitz (born March 6, 1938) is a street photographer, and portrait and landscape photographer. He began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. In the early 1970s he taught the first color course at the Cooper Union in New York City where many of today's renowned color photographers studied with him. Inspired by seeing Robert Frank at work, Meyerowitz quit his job as an art director at an advertising agency and took to the streets of New York City with a 35mm camera and black-and-white film, alongside Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray...

Eden Rock 1973 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition The mansion of Remy de Haenen on a peninsula in the bay of St. Jean at Eden Rock on the Caribbean island of St Bar...

"I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the ...

Highlighting and capturing the raw natural beauty of the Californian coast, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming landscapes. Showcasing the raw natural beauty of Colorado: 30x108" , ...

Pigment photographic paper - photography & fine art print © Jean Pierre De Neef Artwork sold in perfect condition from a limited edition of 12 ex- Composition from an assembly of 4 shots digitaly edited and made in 2015 Our gallery has its own production department and you can receive a small format demonstrative copy of this artwork on request, send a message & we will send it to you free of charge. Jean-Pierre De Neef came to photography like a new convert to religion, convinced that it would lend meaning to his life. His path took him first to a photographic laboratory, having once been a Cibachrome expert, regularly visited by French art photographers who made their way to Brussels to consult him. Well-versed in modern high performance techniques, nowadays Jean-Pierre De Neef produces art photos for several internationally known photographers whose works can be found in galleries and fairs the world over. Twelve years ago Jean-Pierre De Neef’s encounter with François Bayle, art critic and curator of the works of various photographers for Brussels Art Edition, enabled him to pursue his passion in new fields. He was at the side of the Italian photographer Fabrizio La Torre (Rome 1921, Brussels 2014) in the last few years of his life, who entrusted him with detailed instructions for digitising his archives and explained to him the results he was seeking. Jean-Pierre De Neef with his refined technical skills, and François Bayle with his creativity made up a team which was perfectly equipped to stage a number of well-received exhibitions of the work of Fabrizo La Torre - Museum of Ixelles (Brussels 2011), Principality of Monaco, an excellent Retrospective,(2014) and Bangkok (2019), which involved the presentation of the photos taken in Thailand between 1956 to 1961. Similar restoration work was performed on the photographic archives of the German photographer Jörg Krichbaum (d. 2002 in Brussels) and the remarkable photos of Rome...

'The Flesh of The World' Edition 2/10, 20x30cm, 2012, printed on Velvet Watercolor, 310gsm, Bright White, Acid Free, Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. Tao Ruspoli (bo...

Color fine art long exposure seascape - landscape photography. Archival pigment ink print as part of a limited edition of 5. All Gerald Berghammer prints are made to order in limited...

Forest White (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 125x128cm, Edition 3/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the Polaroid. Signature lab...

Mesmerizing large format photograph of ethereal water surface and horizon , a body of works capturing the tactile surfaces and monochromatic nature of oc...

Mesmerizing large scale photograph from the artist's Seascape series, a body of works capturing the tactile surfaces and monochromatic nature of oceanic water and cloudscapes Winter Sunrise by Frank Schott 48 x 72 inches / 122cm x 183cm signed edition of 7 27 x 40 inches / 69cm x 101cm signed edition of 25 archival quality fine art pigment print limited art edition published by Edition EKTAlux...

A contemporary color panoramic photograph, King of the Mountains, 2013 by Chinese artist Yun Hanyu -- is a signed 16" x 36" HD C- print. The King ...

Listing includes free shipping in the US and a 14-day return policy. All prints are made to order and will arrive in mint condition directly from Will Adler's studio in Santa Barbara. Will Adler Mexico, 2012 20 x 30 inch archival pigment print Edition 6 of 8 - *last print at this price* Signed on adhesive certificate Other sizes are available from the same edition. 30" wide, 40" wide, 50" wide and 60" wide. Please inquire for pricing. Artist Biography - Will Adler is a 38 year old west coast photographer known for his distinctive take on the surf world. Adler's laid back, light infused images, (as often of women surfers as men) convey the spirit and atmosphere of place as much as the action of the sport and have earned him a cult following in surfing and photography circles. For his summer show at Danziger Gallery, Adler is showing pictures from Hawaii, California, and Montauk shot for himself and for magazines such as Juxtapoz, Neon, Surfer, WAX, and The New Yorker, His commercial clients have included Quiksilver, Patagonia, Nike, and Hixsept. The 2014 summer show at Danziger Gallery was curated by Tom...

Panoramic view from the city of Ghent Pigment photographic paper - photography & fine art print © Jean Pierre De Neef You make my head spin serie - Tribute to Belgium The technique...

Photographer Mark Klett is best known for cool, impersonal images of desert landscapes in the American Southwest, taken from a similar vantage points and under similar lighting condi...

ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Niall Staines is a digital artist based in Ireland. His work is graphic, vibrant and visually arresting. Nature is a consistent theme in his work, often turning se...

Yosemite #54 - from the series US Road trip Diary - 2007, 20x20cm, Edition of 10. Archival pigment print, based on an original Polaroid on beautiful PHOTO RAG ® ULTRA SMOOTH pape...

Down Stream is a limited-edition photograph by contemporary artist Luca Marziale. This photograph is sold unframed as a print only. It is available in 2 dimensions: *76.2 × 76.2 cm...

Edition of 3 + 1 Artist’s Proof. Ultrachrome print. Young-Jin Choi, was born in 1965 in the southern coastal area of Jeollanam-do province. He began taking photographs in high schoo...

El Mirage Lake, where the Southern Californian Timing Association, Land Speed Racing event, tracks in the ground from the previous days racing, adding a beauty to the natural landsca...

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Autumn - 2001, 20x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid Slide. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. LIFE’S A DREAM (The Personal World of Stefanie Schneider) by Mark Gisbourne Projection is a form of apparition that is characteristic of our human nature, for what we imagine almost invariably transcends the reality of what we live. And, an apparition, as the word suggests, is quite literally ‘an appearing’, for what we appear to imagine is largely shaped by the imagination of its appearance. If this sounds tautological then so be it. But the work of Stefanie Schneider is almost invariably about chance and apparition. And, it is through the means of photography, the most apparitional of image-based media, that her pictorial narratives or photo-novels are generated. Indeed, traditional photography (as distinct from new digital technology) is literally an ‘awaiting’ for an appearance to take place, in line with the imagined image as executed in the camera and later developed in the dark room. The fact that Schneider uses out-of-date Polaroid film stock to take her pictures only intensifies the sense of their apparitional contents when they are realised. The stability comes only at such time when the images are re-shot and developed in the studio, and thereby fixed or arrested temporarily in space and time. The unpredictable and at times unstable film she adopts for her works also creates a sense of chance within the outcome that can be imagined or potentially envisaged by the artist Schneider. But this chance manifestation is a loosely controlled, or, better called existential sense of chance, which becomes pre-disposed by the immediate circumstances of her life and the project she is undertaking at the time. Hence the choices she makes are largely open-ended choices, driven by a personal nature and disposition allowing for a second appearing of things whose eventual outcome remains undefined. And, it is the alliance of the chance-directed material apparition of Polaroid film, in turn explicitly allied to the experiences of her personal life circumstances, that provokes the potential to create Stefanie Schneider’s open-ended narratives. Therefore they are stories based on a degenerate set of conditions that are both material and human, with an inherent pessimism and a feeling for the sense of sublime ridicule being seemingly exposed. This in turn echoes and doubles the meaning of the verb ‘to expose’. To expose being embedded in the technical photographic process, just as much as it is in the narrative contents of Schneider’s photo-novel exposés. The former being the unstable point of departure, and the latter being the uncertain ends or meanings that are generated through the photographs doubled exposure. The large number of speculative theories of apparition, literally read as that which appears, and/or creative visions in filmmaking and photography are self-evident, and need not detain us here. But from the earliest inception of photography artists have been concerned with manipulated and/or chance effects, be they directed towards deceiving the viewer, or the alchemical investigations pursued by someone like Sigmar Polke. None of these are the real concern of the artist-photographer Stefanie Schneider, however, but rather she is more interested with what the chance-directed appearances in her photographs portend. For Schneider’s works are concerned with the opaque and porous contents of human relations and events, the material means are largely the mechanism to achieving and exposing the ‘ridiculous sublime’ that has come increasingly to dominate the contemporary affect(s) of our world. The uncertain conditions of today’s struggles as people attempt to relate to each other - and to themselves - are made manifest throughout her work. And, that she does this against the backdrop of the so-called ‘American Dream’, of a purportedly advanced culture that is Modern America, makes them all the more incisive and critical as acts of photographic exposure. From her earliest works of the late nineties one might be inclined to see her photographs as if they were a concerted attempt at an investigative or analytic serialisation, or, better still, a psychoanalytic dissection of the different and particular genres of American subculture. But this is to miss the point for the series though they have dates and subsequent publications remain in a certain sense unfinished. Schneider’s work has little or nothing to do with reportage as such, but with recording human culture in a state of fragmentation and slippage. And, if a photographer like Diane Arbus dealt specifically with the anomalous and peculiar that made up American suburban life, the work of Schneider touches upon the alienation of the commonplace. That is to say how the banal stereotypes of Western Americana have been emptied out, and claims as to any inherent meaning they formerly possessed has become strangely displaced. Her photographs constantly fathom the familiar, often closely connected to traditional American film genre, and make it completely unfamiliar. Of course Freud would have called this simply the unheimlich or uncanny. But here again Schneider almost never plays the role of the psychologist, or, for that matter, seeks to impart any specific meanings to the photographic contents of her images. The works possess an edited behavioural narrative (she has made choices), but there is never a sense of there being a clearly defined story. Indeed, the uncertainty of my reading here presented, acts as a caveat to the very condition that Schneider’s photographs provoke. Invariably the settings of her pictorial narratives are the South West of the United States, most often the desert and its periphery in Southern California. The desert is a not easily identifiable space, with the suburban boundaries where habitation meets the desert even more so. There are certain sub-themes common to Schneider’s work, not least that of journeying, on the road, a feeling of wandering and itinerancy, or simply aimlessness. Alongside this subsidiary structural characters continually appear, the gas station, the automobile, the motel, the highway, the revolver, logos and signage, the wasteland, the isolated train track and the trailer. If these form a loosely defined structure into which human characters and events are cast, then Schneider always remains the fulcrum and mechanism of their exposure. Sometimes using actresses, friends, her sister, colleagues or lovers, Schneider stands by to watch the chance events as they unfold. And, this is even the case when she is a participant in front of camera of her photo-novels. It is the ability to wait and throw things open to chance and to unpredictable circumstances, that marks the development of her work over the last eight years. It is the means by which random occurrences take on such a telling sense of pregnancy in her work. However, in terms of analogy the closest proximity to Schneider’s photographic work is that of film. For many of her titles derive directly from film, in photographic series like OK Corral (1999), Vegas (1999), Westworld (1999), Memorial Day (2001), Primary Colours (2001), Suburbia (2004), The Last Picture Show (2005), and in other examples. Her works also include particular images that are titled Zabriskie Point, a photograph of her sister in an orange wig. Indeed the tentative title for the present publication Stranger Than Paradise is taken from Jim Jarmusch’s film of the same title in 1984. Yet it would be dangerous to take this comparison too far, since her series 29 Palms (1999) presages the later title of a film that appeared only in 2002. What I am trying to say here is that film forms the nexus of American culture, and it is not so much that Schneider’s photographs make specific references to these films (though in some instances they do), but that in referencing them she accesses the same American culture that is being emptied out and scrutinised by her photo-novels. In short her pictorial narratives might be said to strip films of the stereotypical Hollywood tropes that many of them possess. Indeed, the films that have most inspired her are those that similarly deconstruct the same sentimental and increasingly tawdry ‘American Dream’ peddled by Hollywood. These include films like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990) The Lost Highway (1997), John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994) or films like Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise with all its girl-power Bonny and Clyde-type clichés. But they serve no more than as a backdrop, a type of generic tableau from which Schneider might take human and abstracted elements, for as commercial films they are not the product of mere chance and random occurrence. Notwithstanding this observation, it is also clear that the gender deconstructions that the characters in these films so often portray, namely the active role of women possessed of a free and autonomous sexuality (even victim turned vamp), frequently find resonances within the behavioural events taking place in Schneider’s photographs and DVD sequences; the same sense of sexual autonomy that Stefanie Schneider possesses and is personally committed to. In the series 29 Palms (first begun in 1999) the two women characters Radha and Max act out a scenario that is both infantile and adolescent. Wearing brightly coloured fake wigs of yellow and orange, a parody of the blonde and the redhead, they are seemingly trailer park white trash possessing a sentimental and kitsch taste in clothes totally inappropriate to the locality. The fact that Schneider makes no judgment about this is an interesting adjunct. Indeed, the photographic projection of the images is such that the girls incline themselves to believe that they are both beautiful and desirous. However, unlike the predatory role of women in say Richard Prince’s photographs, which are simply a projection of a male fantasy onto women, Radha and Max are self-contained in their vacuous if empty trailer and motel world of the swimming pool, nail polish, and childish water pistols. Within the photographic sequence Schneider includes herself, and acts as a punctum of disruption. Why is she standing in front of an Officers’ Wives Club? Why is Schneider not similarly attired? Is there a proximity to an army camp, are these would-be Lolita(s) Rahda and Max wives or American marine groupies, and where is the centre and focus of their identity? It is the ambiguity of personal involvement that is set up by Schneider which deliberately makes problematic any clear sense of narrative construction. The strangely virulent colours of the bleached-out girls stand in marked contrast to Schneider’s own anodyne sense of self-image. Is she identifying with the contents or directing the scenario? With this series, perhaps, more than any other, Schneider creates a feeling of a world that has some degree of symbolic order. For example the girls stand or squat by a dirt road, posing the question as to their sexual and personal status. Following the 29 Palms series, Schneider will trust herself increasingly by diminishing the sense of a staged environment. The events to come will tell you both everything and nothing, reveal and obfuscate, point towards and simultaneously away from any clearly definable meaning. If for example we compare 29 Palms to say Hitchhiker (2005), and where the sexual contents are made overtly explicit, we do not find the same sense of simulated identity. It is the itinerant coming together of two characters Daisy and Austen, who meet on the road and subsequently share a trailer together. Presented in a sequential DVD and still format, we become party to a would-be relationship of sorts. No information is given as to the background or social origins, or even any reasons as to why these two women should be attracted to each other. Is it acted out? Are they real life experiences? They are women who are sexually free in expressing themselves. But while the initial engagement with the subject is orchestrated by Schneider, and the edited outcome determined by the artist, beyond that we have little information with which to construct a story. The events are commonplace, edgy and uncertain, but the viewer is left to decide as to what they might mean as a narrative. The disaggregated emotions of the work are made evident, the game or role playing, the transitory fantasies palpable, and yet at the same time everything is insubstantial and might fall apart at any moment. The characters relate but they do not present a relationship in any meaningful sense. Or, if they do, it is one driven the coincidental juxtaposition of random emotions. Should there be an intended syntax it is one that has been stripped of the power to grammatically structure what is being experienced. And, this seems to be the central point of the work, the emptying out not only of a particular American way of life, but the suggestion that the grounds upon which it was once predicated are no longer possible. The photo-novel Hitchhiker is porous and the culture of the seventies which it might be said to homage is no longer sustainable. Not without coincidence, perhaps, the decade that was the last ubiquitous age of Polaroid film. In the numerous photographic series, some twenty or so, that occur between 29 Palms and Hitchhiker, Schneider has immersed herself and scrutinised many aspects of suburban, peripheral, and scrubland America. Her characters, including herself, are never at the centre of cultural affairs. Such eccentricities as they might possess are all derived from what could be called their adjacent status to the dominant culture of America. In fact her works are often sated with references to the sentimental sub-strata that underpin so much of American daily life. It is the same whether it is flower gardens and household accoutrements of her photo-series Suburbia (2004), or the transitional and environmental conditions depicted in The Last Picture Show (2005). The artist’s use of sentimental song titles, often adapted to accompany individual images within a series by Schneider, show her awareness of America’s close relationship between popular film and music. For example the song ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, becomes Leaving in a Jet Plane as part of The Last Picture Show series, while the literalism of the plane in the sky is shown in one element of this diptych, but juxtaposed to a blonde-wigged figure first seen in 29 Palms. This indicates that every potential narrative element is open to continual reallocation in what amounts to a story without end. And, the interchangeable nature of the images, like a dream, is the state of both a pictorial and affective flux that is the underlying theme pervading Schneider’s photo-narratives. For dream is a site of yearning or longing, either to be with or without, a human pursuit of a restless but uncertain alternative to our daily reality. The scenarios that Schneider sets up nonetheless have to be initiated by the artist. And, this might be best understood by looking at her three recent DVD sequenced photo-novels, Reneé’s Dream and Sidewinder (2005). We have already considered the other called Hitchhiker. In the case of Sidewinder the scenario was created by internet where she met J.D. Rudometkin, an ex-theologian, who agreed to her idea to live with her for five weeks in the scrubland dessert environment of Southern California. The dynamics and unfolding of their relationship, both sexually and emotionally, became the primary subject matter of this series of photographs. The relative isolation and their close proximity, the interactive tensions, conflicts and submissions, are thus recorded to reveal the day-to-day evolution of their relationship. That a time limit was set on this relation-based experiment was not the least important aspect of the project. The text and music accompanying the DVD were written by the American Rudometkin, who speaks poetically of “Torn Stevie. Scars from the weapon to her toes an accidental act of God her father said. On Vaness at California.” The mix of hip reverie and fantasy-based language of his text, echoes the chaotic unfolding of their daily life in this period, and is evident in the almost sun-bleached Polaroid images like Whisky Dance, where the two abandon themselves to the frenetic circumstances of the moment. Thus Sidewinder, a euphemism for both a missile and a rattlesnake, hints at the libidinal and emotional dangers that were risked by Schneider and Rudometkin. Perhaps, more than any other of her photo-novels it was the most spontaneous and immediate, since Schneider’s direct participation mitigated against and narrowed down the space between her life and the art work. The explicit and open character of their relationship at this time (though they have remained friends), opens up the question as the biographical role Schneider plays in all her work. She both makes and directs the work while simultaneously dwelling within the artistic processes as they unfold. Hence she is both author and character, conceiving the frame within which things will take place, and yet subject to the same unpredictable outcomes that emerge in the process. In Reneé’s Dream, issues of role reversal take place as the cowgirl on her horse undermines the male stereotype of Richard Prince’s ‘Marlboro Country’. This photo-work along with several others by Schneider, continue to undermine the focus of the male gaze, for her women are increasingly autonomous and subversive. They challenge the male role of sexual predator, often taking the lead and undermining masculine role play, trading on male fears that their desires can be so easily attained. That she does this by working through archetypal male conventions of American culture, is not the least of the accomplishments in her work. What we are confronted with frequently is of an idyll turned sour, the filmic clichés that Hollywood and American television dramas have promoted for fifty years. The citing of this in the Romantic West, where so many of the male clichés were generated, only adds to the diminishing sense of substance once attributed to these iconic American fabrications. And, that she is able to do this through photographic images rather than film, undercuts the dominance espoused by time-based film. Film feigns to be seamless though we know it is not. Film operates with a story board and setting in which scenes are elaborately arranged and pre-planned. Schneider has thus been able to generate a genre of fragmentary events, the assemblage of a story without a storyboard. But these post-narratological stories require another component, and that component is the viewer who must bring their own interpretation as to what is taking place. If this can be considered the upside of her work, the downside is that she never positions herself by giving a personal opinion as to the events that are taking place in her photographs. But, perhaps, this is nothing more than her use of the operation of chance dictates. I began this essay by speaking about the apparitional contents of Stefanie Schneider’s pictorial narratives, and meant at that time the literal and chance-directed ‘appearing’ qualities of her photographs. Perhaps, at this moment we should also think of the metaphoric contents of the word apparition. There is certainly a spectre-like quality also, a ghostly uncertainty about many of the human experiences found in her subject matter. Is it that the subculture of the American Dream, or the way of life Schneider has chosen to record, has in turn become also the phantom of it former self? Are these empty and fragmented scenarios a mirror of what has become of contemporary America? There is certainly some affection for their contents on the part of the artist, but it is somehow tainted with pessimism and the impossibility of sustainable human relations, with the dissolute and commercial distractions of America today. Whether this is the way it is, or, at least, the way it is perceived by Schneider is hard to assess. There is a bleak lassitude about so many of her characters. But then again the artist has so inured herself into this context over a long protracted period that the boundaries between the events and happenings photographed, and the personal life of Stefanie Schneider, have become similarly opaque. Is it the diagnosis of a condition, or just a recording of a phenomenon? Only the viewer can decide this question. For the status of Schneider’s certain sense of uncertainty is, perhaps, the only truth we may ever know.

1 Kerry Brougher (ed.), Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, ex. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, 1996) 2 Im Reich der Phantome: Fotographie des Unsichtbaren, ex. cat., Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach/Kunsthalle Krems/FotomuseumWinterthur, (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997) 3 Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish – Sigmar Polke, Museum of Contemporary Art (Zürich-Berlin-New York, 1995) 4 Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle, Occasional Papers, no. 1, 2000. 5 Diane Arbus, eds. Doon Arbus, and Marvin Israel...

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