1990s Photography

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 The fact that Schneider uses out-of-date Polaroid film stock to take her pictures only intensifies the sense of their apparitional contents when they are realised.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...

Polo People Spectators and a competitor in a polo match, Argentina, December 1990. 16×20 inches - paper size Estate Stamped Collection Edition to 150 Photo by Slim Aarons Pri...

Erupt 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Not mounted.

16 x 20" vintage silver gelatin photograph, multiple exposure female nude. Titled, numbered, dated, and signed by Jack Mitchell on the recto. Comes directly from the Jack Mitchell Ar...

Gelatin silver print Stamped and numbered, verso 14 x 11 inches, sheet (Edition of 15) 20 x 16 inches, sheet (Edition of 10) 24 x 20 inches, sheet (Edition of 10) From the series...

Blue Dress (Sidewinder) Proof b4 Printing / 2005, 38x36cm analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid, signed on front. This is a raw analog C-print, hand-print...

“We are living in a hall of mirrors. In drag, we witness the triumph of illusion.” - Holly Brubach & Michael James O’Brien Men, Women, and Drag, draws inspiration from his diverse...

'10525' part 1 (Stranger than Paradise) - 1999 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 388_1.54 not ...

'Porto Rotondo' Pleasure yachts moored in a sandy cove at Porto Rotondo, Sardinia, July 1990. Paper Size 24x20 inches / 60 x 50 cm Estate Stamped Collection Edition to 150 ...

This is from a series done about the Habad Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. This is from the holiday Lag Baomer. Jay Wolke lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, Harvard University and the California Museum of Photography. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Three monographs of his work have been published: All Around the House: Photographs of American-Jewish Communal Life (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway (Center for American Places, 2004) and Architecture of Resignation: Photographs from the Mezzogiorno (Center for American Places, 2011). Kehrer Verlag will publish his fourth monograph, Same Dream Another Time, in 2017. Wolke received his B.F.A. in Printmaking / Illustration at Washington University, St. Louis, and an M.S. in Photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Since 1981 he has taught photography and art at various universities. From 1992-1999 he was Coordinator of Graduate Documentary Photography at the Institute of Design (IIT). In 1999-2000 he was Head of Art and Graduate Studies at Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he also served as Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000-05 and again from 2008-14. Wolke has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, Focus Infinity Fund and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Geo France, New York Times Magazine, Financial Times Magazine, Village Voice, Exposure and Architectural Record. SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 Mostre Marte, Salerno, Italy, “Architecture of Resignation” 2014 PrimoPiano Gallery, Naples, Italy, “Architecture of Resignation” 2014 Foundation Studio Marangoni, Florence, Italy, “re-Located” 2014 Ralph Arnold Gallery, Loyola University, Chicago, “re-Located” 2013 Spertus Institute, Chicago, “All Around the House” 2012 University of Indiana Northwest Savanna Center, “Architecture of Resignation” 2010 Sheldon Arts Galleries, St. Louis, MO, “Architecture of Resignation” 2007 California Museum of Photography, Riverside, “Architecture of Resignation” 2006 St. Xavier University SXU Gallery, Chicago, “Architecture of Resignation” 2005 Schneider Gallery, Chicago, “Architecture of Resignation” 2005 City Gallery, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, “Along the Divide” 2002 Foundation Studio Marangoni, Florence, Italy, “Architecture of Resignation” 2002 St. Louis Art Museum, "All Around the House" 2000 Comunita Ebraica Salle Servi, Florence , Italy, “All Around the House” 1998 Art Institute of Chicago, "All Around the House" 1995 Harvard University, Carpenter Center, Cambridge, MA, "A Jewish View" 1994 Quad City Arts Center, Rock Island, IL "Temporary Usage" 1993 Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe, "Temporary Usage" 1992 OK Harris Gallery, New York, NY, " Photographing American Dream Cities" 1991 Mid-Town Y Photography Gallery, New York, NY, "American Dream Cities” 1988 Portland School of Art, Portland, ME, "Las Vegas Portraits" 1987 Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, " Vegas Portraits" 1985 Chicago Historical Society, “Dan Ryan Project” SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016 Le Murate, Florence, Italy, “Arno Collective Imaginary” w. Massimo Vitali, Arno Minkkinen 2015 Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, “Henri Cartier-Bresson e gli altri. I grandi fotografi e l’Italia”, 2014 Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA, “Racial Imaginary” 2014 Black Box Gallery, Portland, OR, “Architecture, Landscape” 2014-15 Millennium Park Foundation, Chicago, “An Anatomy in Photographs” 2012 Chicago Cultural Center, “Industry of the Ordinary: 2003–2013” 2009 David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago, “Social Landscapes” 2009 Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, “39 Verbs” 2009 University of St. Francis, “The Night Hope Won” 2008-09 Chicago Cultural Center, “Made In Chicago: Photographs from Bank of America Collection” 2006 David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, "7 Documentarians: Berenic Abbott, Walker Evans, Larry Clark, Jim Dow, Danny Lyon, Garry Winogrand, Jay Wolke" 2006 Art Institute of Chicago. “Darkroom to Digital” 2005 Fort Worth Community Arts Center, “Cattle Drive” 2001 Illinois Art Gallery, “The Land Around Us” 1998 Carol Ehlers Gallery, Chicago, "Chicago Streets" 1996 Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, "In Focus" 1995 Madison Arts Center, "Photography from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois" 1994 Chicago Cultural Center, "Broad Spectrum" 1991 ARC Gallery, Chicago, "National Exposure" 1989 Art Institute of Chicago, "The City Inside and Out" 1989 Chicago Historical Society, "Changing Chicago, Public Diversions" 1988 Illinois State Museum, Springfield, "Lenscapes" 1987 Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; Nabisco Corp., NJ; Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA "American Interiors", traveling exhibit curated Lieberman/Saul Gallery, NY 1986 National Endowment for the Arts/ Midwest Arts Alliance, national traveling 1985 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, "New Color Photography" 1985 Society for Cont Photography, Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, MO, "Photo '85" 1984 Art...

Gelatin silver print (Edition of 35) Signed and numbered in ink, verso This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City.

A giant game of chess in Santa Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, 1993. Estate stamped and hand numbered edition of 150 with certificate of authenticity from the estate. Slim Aarons (...

Untitled (Immaculate Springs) - 1998 58x57cm Edition of 5, plus 2 Artist Proofs Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on her expired original Polaroid. Signature Label ...

Sax - Limited edition archival pigment print, 1999 - Edition of 10 This is an Archival Pigment print on fiber based paper ( Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 gsm , Acid-free and li...

"Kate Moss Side" by Jake Chessum Portrait of a young 16 year old Kate Moss – just before she shot to supermodel stardom and became the icon she is today. Jake grew up in Croydon, South London. He studied Graphic Design at St. Martins School Of Art, and started working as photographer straight out of college. Assignments for The Face, Arena, and an early ad campaign for “Neutrogena” featuring a 16 year old Kate Moss followed. By 1995 Jake was regularly flying the Atlantic on assignment for JFK Jrs' “George” Magazine and in 1999 he upped sticks and moved permanently to NYC where he still lives with his wife and 2 kids...

Childhood 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Medium format Negative. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted.

Max, Trailer Park (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 Edition 3/10, 68x60cm including white 'Polaroid' frame. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Mounted on Alum...

Richard Ashcroft - Signed Limited Edition Oversized Print Mojo Magazine Cover April 27 2000 London (photo Kevin Westenberg) NB All prints are sig...

Motorcycling Lord 1990 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition 1990: Lord Hesketh, Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, by the lake in the grounds ...

Gas station at Night I (Stranger than Paradise) - 2006 Edition 1/5, 48x46 each, 93x91cm installed with gaps. 4 analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist, based on the 4 Polaroid...

Flower (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label artist Inventory No. 197639, Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider’s work is a med...

Snake Dips Down, interior photograph from Richard Heeps Ordinary Places series, it was captured in the final years of British Hong Kong in a colonial home on the Peak. The almost mon...

This photograph is printed on Japanese Paper. The price is for an unframed photograph. 11" X 14" Edition of 25. The Robin Rice Gallery is pleased to announce, 25 Years of Polaro...

This black and white portrait by Robert Giard entitled "Marcos" is offered by CLAMP in New York City. 1995 Signed, titled, and dated in ink, recto; Also signed in pencil, verso Vi...

Edition of 10 The young Supermodel Nadja Auerman with a bicycle in Seville. Fashion and fine art embrace each other in the photography of Jacques Olivar (b. 1941), where the miseen...

Stoya Smoking Photo by Markus Klinko Limited Estate Edition C Print Produced from the original transparency Certificate of authenticity supplied Paper size 20 × 24 inches/ 51 x ...

Snow Flakes (Californication) - 2021 20x24cm. Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory Numb...

10525 (Stranger than Paradise) - 1999, Edition 9/10, 5 analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist, based on 5 Polaroids. each 57x56 cm, installed with gaps 57x308cm. Certific...

Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti depicts nature, eroded and broken down by civilization, but does not put man and the environment in opposite camps. He sees an equal relations...

The Urge to Disappear (Stranger than Paradise) - 1997 59x43cm, Edition 3/10. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. A...

Mindscreen 7, 1999, 58x56cm, Edition 3/10. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on an expired Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 248.03. No...

Little Buddha by Robert Curran Image size: 24 x 16 inches Framed 41.5 x 34 x 1 inches Archival pigment print/ signed by the artist 1998     Robert was born in Manhattan and moved to...

Toned gelatin silver print Signed, titled, dated, and numbered, recto 14 x 11 inches, sheet (Edition of 25) 20 x 16 inches, sheet (Edition of 25) 24 x 20 inches, sheet (Edition of...

Selenium-toned gelatin silver print (Edition of 20) Signed and numbered on label, verso From the series, "Before the Camera" This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York...

Coming from an earlier interest in portraits and street photography, my Nudes in Water are less about eroticism and more about body as the human vessel for our multi-faceted but brie...

This print is currently featured in our exhibition, Warm Regards, and will be available to ship after the show closes June 24th, 2017. Pentti Sammallahti is a benchmark figure in co...

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Winter - 2001, 20x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid Slide. Signature label and Certifi...

Everts Township Homestead, Summer, 1993 Fabulous American landscape photography of a rural landscape scene. from small hand signed edition of 20 Large Format Chromogenic print on Ko...

'Penelope' from the movie Immaculate Springs - 1998 Edition of 5, 58x56cm, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Signature Label ...

Untitled (29 Palms, CA), 1999, 20x24cm, Edition 1/10, Photograph printed on Velvet Watercolor, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, not mounted Artist Inventory Num...

Cap Juluca Hotel 1992 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition Patricia and Margaret O’Neil at the Cap Juluca Hotel in Cap Juluca, Anguilla, 1992. unframed c type print ...

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Hotsprings - 2001, 20x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid Slide. Signature label and Cer...

Blue Chair (Life on Mars) 20x30cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted.

View From Il Pellicano 1991 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition Aerial view with sunbathers and parasols and, dotted with yachts and small boats, the waters off the ...

Porto Ercole Boats 1991 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition Boats off Porto Ercole, Tuscany, July 1991. unframed c type print printed 2023 20 × 16 inches - paper si...

Performative photo - on a dark background expressive bust of a girl in a green dress with a hairstyle of raw meat. Photography (Fujicolor print) 1997/98 In good condition

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Fellini and Trouble - 2001, 20x85cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid Slide. Signature labe...

Portrait Of Marilyn Manson 1998 Los Angeles Archival Fine Art pigment print edition of 10 30 x 40 inches / 76 xc 101 cm signed and numbered on the fr...

Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti depicts nature, eroded and broken down by civilization, but does not put man and the environment in opposite camps. He sees an equal relations...

Superman 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Not mounted.

Depeche Mode - Signed Limited Edition Oversized Print Depeche Mode (from left: Andy Fletcher, Martin Gore, Vince Clarke, Dave Gahan) Cover shoot for Mel...

Anita, part of Richard Heeps autobiographical series, 'A View of the Fens from the Car With Wings', a journey on the roads of his childhood. Unusually for Richard this is a staged ph...

Marilyn Manson - Signed Limited Edition Oversize print NME Cover Shoot August 14, 1998 Los Angeles (photo Kevin Westenberg) Unframed Signed and numbered by the artist. Limite...

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Winter - 2001, 20x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the 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...

Mountain Ridge (Stranger than Paradise) - 1999 44x59cm, Edition 1/10, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 535.01. Not mounted....

Somewhere in Australia, 1995 - 20x32cm, Edition of 10, digital C-Print based on a 35mm negative. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted.

Cyanotype (Unique) Signed, titled, and dated in pencil, verso This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. These cyanotype prints of botanical...

Les Acrobates VII H 27.5 in. x 35.5 in. W Edition 6 Unframed Les Acrobates Series This series was part of a calendar, and pays tribute to the art of the circus and its artists. ____...

Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti depicts nature, eroded and broken down by civilization, but does not put man and the environment in opposite camps. He sees an equal relations...

Glyndebourne Opera Festival England 1985 by Homer Sykes oversize 40 x 30 inches / 101 x 76 cm paper size signed limited edition print edition of 5 only this size printed 2022 Certificate of authenticity provided Note Other sizes available Chelsea, London, England circa May 1985. The Chelsea Flower Show. Visitors sheltering, its raining, its summer in Britain. People sitting under their umbrellas. Homer Sykes Sykes's father, Homer Warwick Sykes, was a Canadian-born American of English extraction who worked for the China National Aviation Corporation in Shanghai; his mother, Helen Grimmitt, was Canadian-born and raised in Hong Kong. The couple were married in August 1947, but in June 1948, in an early stage of his wife's pregnancy, Homer was killed in an accident at Lunghua airfield. Helen returned to her family home in Vancouver, and the son was born three weeks later, in 1949.[1][2] When the boy's mother remarried in 1954, the family moved to England.[3] Homer was a keen photographer as a teenager, with a darkroom both at home and at boarding school. In 1968 he started a three-year course at the London College of Printing (LCP),[1][3] while sharing a house in St John's Wood.[4] In the summer vacation during his first year, he went to New York, and was impressed by the work of current photographers – Cartier-Bresson, Davidson, Friedlander, Frank, Uzzle and Winogrand – that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art.[3] Solo exhibitions "Traditional British Calendar Customs", Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), 1977;[14] Side Gallery (Newcastle), 31 August – 25 September 1977.[15] "Shanghai Odyssey", Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), 24 May – 20 June 2003.[14][16] Festival of Photography and Contemporary Art (Biella), 2005.[14] "On the Road Again", Hereford Town Hall (Hereford Photography Festival), 2002.[17] "Green Man and Friends, photographs from the 1970s", WPS (Hastings), 2009.[18] "England 1970–1980", Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau (Gentilly, Paris), 27 June – 12 October 2014.[10][11][19][20] "My Britain 1970–1980", Les Douches la Galerie, Paris. 5 September – 31 October 2015.[21][22][23] "Once a Year – Homer Sykes", Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, May–June 2021[24] Other exhibitions "Personal Views 1850–1970", British Council touring exhibition, 1970.[3] "Traditional Country Customs" (with work by Benjamin Stone), ICA (London), 1971.[3][14] "Young British Photographers", Museum of Modern Art (Oxford), 1971.[14] Exhibition of photographs by Stone and Sykes of festivals, customs and pageants, Southampton and Birmingham, 1973.[7] "Reportage Fotografen", Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna), 1978.[14] "Il Regno Unito si diverte". British Council, Milan, 1981. With Chris Steele-Perkins and Patrick Ward.[25] "The Other Britain", National Theatre (London), and touring in Britain, 1982.[26] "A British Eye on the World", Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), 1986.[14] "Viva, une agence photographique", Jeu de Paume (Paris), 2007.[27][28] "How We Are: Photographing Britain." Tate Britain (London), 2007.[29][30] "No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1968–1987", Aberystwyth Arts Centre; Tullie House (Carlisle); Ujazdów Castle (Warsaw).[31] "Unpopular culture." De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill), 2008.[32] "The Other Britain Revisited: Photographs from New Society", Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010.[26] "Goodbye London: Radical art and politics in the seventies", Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (Berlin), 26 June – 15 August 2010. With Stuart Brisley, Victor Burgin, David Hall, Margaret Harrison, Derek Jarman...