Photographic Paper Portrait Photography

Elsa Peretti was born in Florence, studied interior design and was a language teacher and ski instructor before becoming a model. Peretti settled in New York in 1968 and began a care...

Radha Leopard Dress II (29 Palms, CA), 1999, 102x100cm, sold out Lumas Edition of 100, Artist Proofs 3/3. Lambda Print, based on an expired Polaroid. Certificate and Signature lab...

Drive to Russian River (My own private travel Diary) - 1991 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate...

Failure in Black by Abi Polinsky 2022 Print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag paper, mounted on foam board and canvas W 60" x H 40" — Unframed. Signed limited ...

Photo portrait of a woman by Arnulf Rabl (German-American, 1942-2016). In this soft portrait, the woman has her head turned slightly down, with closed eyes. There is light striking t...

Arabic girl is a silver salt print realized in the early 20th century. Hand signed lower right in red pencil, not readable. Includes frame

This Limited Edition Photograph was authorized by the Ben Martin Estate. Ben Martin was TIME Magazine’s first New York Bureau staff photographer covering wars, fashion, politics, art...

American silent film actress Phyllis Gordon (1889 - 1964) window-shopping in Earls Court, London with her four-year-old cheetah who was flown to Britain from Kenya. (Photo by B C Par...

Michael Childers Andy Warhol in Paris with Sitting Bird 1976, 2007 Photographic print hand signed in black felt tip pen lower right front; the back be...

The Games we played (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 24x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 artist proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, art...

Untitled (Traintracks) - The last Picture Show - 2004, 38x37cm. Edition of 5, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Ar...

The protest - Historical photograph about the feminist movement is an original black and white photograph realized in Rome in 1978 by the Agency of "Ansa" ...

'Eavesdropping' (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 Edition of 10, 50x50cm. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Artist inventory No. 18257. Not mounted. ...

Shotgun Wedding (Haley and the Birds) - 2013, 60x70cm, Edition 2/5, Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Crystal Fuji Archive Paper (matte), based on the Polaroid. Sign...

American silent film actress Phyllis Gordon (1889 - 1964) window-shopping in Earls Court, London with her four-year-old cheetah who was flown to Britain from Kenya. (Photo by B C Par...

Heliantha by Abi Polinsky 2022 Print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag paper, mounted on foam board and canvas W 50" x H 41" — Unframed. Signed limited edition of 5. — Please contact us...

Stefanie Schneider's work was used for Marc Forster's movie 'Stay', featuring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling. Naomi and Ryan were both portraying artists and Stefanie Schneider's art was the art both characters created during the movie. Stefanie's images were also used for Ryan Gosling's memory sequence, for the end titles, for edits in between and as paintings hanging in several scenes within the movie. This piece: If it would be true...

Desert Bike Biscuits riding in the Folly of Illusions (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x24cm, Edition of 10. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature la...

Large Scale Limited edition color photograph, 40"x60" depicting a group of swimmers beginning a race in the water with a light blue, white tones. The composition captures a large gr...

This Special Edition Photograph was authorized by the Ben Martin Estate. Ben Martin, TIME Magazine’s first New York Bureau staff photographer covered wars, fashion, politics, arts, b...

Failure in White by Abi Polinsky 2022 Print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag paper, mounted on foam board and canvas W 60" x H 40" — Unframed. Signed limited e...

Gillian was born in India in 1933. Her British parents were part of the twilight of the British Raj. Gillian completed her secondary education and entered The University of Reading, England to study Fine art and painting, a five year study. She worked in Dallas, Texas making paintings, creating embroidered wall hangings...

'Penelope' from the movie Immaculate Springs - 1998 Edition of 10, 20x30cm, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Artis...

Vintage Photo. The Italian Actress Valeria Golino.

Vintage Photo. The Italian former actress, television and radio presenter, and lyricist Enrica Bonaccorti.

Untitled (Two Men on Chaise) Printed 2022 Signed and numbered, verso Cyanotype print toned with ammonia and tannic acid (Edition of 5) 7.5 x 9.25 inches, image This work is offer...

What happened yesterday? (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - 2013 - 20x24cm, Edition of 10, digital C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist I...

“I walked into a timeless place … full of supporting actors and actresses of every conceivable role,” Abramson wrote in Light: On the South Side, published by Chicago’s Numero Group in 2009. “Brassai, who photographed nocturnal Paris around 1930, had always been one of my favourite. Having seen, his pictures and, later, read about his experiences, I was fascinated by the implied romance with which he viewed his photography. (…) When I photographed on the South Side, especially in Peppers Hideout, it was very much in recognition of a Brassai–type world. Whether it be ambiance, gestures, or dress, there seemed to be a direct correlation with the Parisian bistros and dance halls that Brassai had photographed.” - Michael Abramson, “Black Night Clubs of Chicago’s South Side”, May 1977. Print details: © Michael L Abramson, Untitled #112, CA. 1974 -1977 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, in custom made frame Image size: 20.5 x 30.5 cm, Printed on 11 x 14" paper (27.9 x 35.4 cm), white border Series: 1970s Nightclubs of Chicago South Side Stamped; "Provenance Authenticated by Michael L Abramson Estate, 2011" on verso Frame: 38 x 48 cm (Custom made classic hardwood frame, stain in black, museum mount board and antireflective UV AR protective art glass) All prints from 1970s South Side Chicago series are available for purchase as the singular works or as the group of images - please view a selection on 1stDibs and the gallery storefront. All works are Vintage Silver Gelatin prints made by the photographer at the time there were taken. All prints can be purchased in bespoke hardwood frames, museum mount board and anti-reflective UV protective Art Glass. If you wish to ship or purchase unframed prints, we are happy to arrange that for you. About the Photographer: Michael L Abramson was born in New Jersey in 1948, the late American photographer graduated with Master of Photography from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1977. His work was regularly featured in Time, New York Times, Newsweek, People, Forbes, Harpers, Wall Street Journal and other popular American and international magazines. He was a highly sought after commercial portrait photographer and photojournalist. His subjects comprised celebrities, prominent stars from sport, politics and the entertainment industry included Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and many more. Yet it was his 1970s series documenting the Chicago South side club scene that made Abramson’s name. Influenced by Brassaï’s photographs of the 1920s Paris, Abramson caught the stylish nightlife of the funk and soul era in full, alluring swing. His work was exhibited frequently since 1978, including a solo show at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, in 2014 and in the same year the group show on American Photography since 1950 at Madison Museum of Contemporary Arts (US). Following Abramson’s death in 2011 a new book entitled Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust From Chicago’s South Side was released by Chicago-based Chicago City...

Rock singer and frontman Freddie Mercury (Frederick Bulsara, 1946 - 1991), of the popular British group Queen, has his moustache groomed. (Photo by Steve Wood...

Springtime (Suburbia) - 2004 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid, Signature label and Certificate, Artist inventory number: 18251. Not mounted. This project "Suburbia" was shot on the set of Marc Forster's first feature film "Everything put Together' 2000 with Radha Mitchell, Michelle Hicks, Megan Mullally...

Locker Room (Suburbia) - 2004 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid, Not mounted, Certificate and signature label. Artist Inventory No. 2757. This project "Suburbia" was shot on the set of Marc Forster's first feature film called "Everything put Together' with Radha Mitchell, Michelle Hicks and Megan Mullally...

Pooh, Thailand, 1987 - 30x20cm, Edition of 10. Archival C-Print based on a 35mm negative. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted.

Gow, Thailand, 1987 - 30x20cm, Edition of 10. Archival C-Print based on a 35mm negative. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted.

This Roadside Giant is called 'Poor Richard', ironic really considering the artists' name, and the sad state of his broken off head. Poor Richard refers t...

American Heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali), training in his gym, 21st May 1965. (Photo by Harry Benson/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) As an authorized Getty ...

Unbound (Wastelands) - 2003 Edition of 10, 38x36cm, Archival C-Print on Crystal Fuji Archive paper, matte surface, based on the Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 836. Signature ...

Vintage Photo. The actress and dancer Alessandra Martines dancing in a television ballet. Photo by Italian news agency S.P.A.

'North Shore Yacht Club I' - Salton Sea (California Badlands) - 1998 50x60cm with white border, Image size: 48x46cm, Edition 2/10, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 585.02, Not mounted. The artist Stefanie Schneider has produced a unique body of work because she was the first to utilize expired Polaroid instant photography. Embracing the ‘imperfections’ this medium can produce Stefanie’s artwork was the inspiration of Instagram and the catalyst that motivated Dr. Florian Kaps to rescue the sole remaining Polaroid film production factory in Holland. Saving the last production equipment just before their planned destruction, therefore saving millions of vintage Polaroid cameras from obsolescence. Hows that for an artist having an effect on her medium of choice! The ‘Impossible film project’ saved the production factory and then a Polish business man bought ‘Impossible film’ and the actual Polaroid company to bring the two back together resulting in the so called ‘Polaroid Originals’ and giving it to his millennial son. (I hear he might also get Fuji film company for Christmas) Stefanie Schneider purchases Polaroid instant film and uses it only at it’s best possible outcome for her planned film shoots. The location, sets, costumes, actors and stories all come from Schneider but that’s just the beginning. The stories and their production take place in the high desert near Joshua Tree in California but the post production is in Berlin, Germany. The chosen photographs are rephotographed to make a negative. Following with the analogue medium, Schneider enlarges and prints old school in a self designed and built analogue darkroom in an old factory studio in Berlin. The largest of her hand printed art works measure 125cm or 49 inches in width with her vintage ‘Colenta’ developing machine. Schneider designed and built her own enlarger to properly fit her concept with the biggest ‘Durst’ enlarger ever built and turned on it’s side so as to print even bigger than was possible in it’s original design and rolls on custom tracks. Schneider created a film production movie set for her biggest film concepts from all her proceeds on an organic (off grid) farm in California where she eats only what she grows. Complete with garden, greenhouse and chicken coop. (It’s also a sanctuary for animals as no meat consumption is permitted) Vintage travel trailers dot the farm where production ideas develop. a costume trailer, film storage in the vintage refrigerators...

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...

This photograph of Marilyn Monroe was shot by photographer, George Barris, in 1962 in Los Angeles, California. This photograph is from a ...

American Heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali), training in his gym, 21st May 1965. (Photo by Harry Benson/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) As an authorized Getty ...

English actor Michael Caine, throwing a punch, August 1965. (Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images). As an authorized Getty Images Gallery partner, we offer premium quality...

The other day I was sure I knew what is good and what is bad (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - 2015 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Digital C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory # 13866. Not mounted. Offered is a piece from the movie: The Girl behind the White Picket Fence A tale told with blemished and expired Polaroid film about the hopes and dreams of an newly orphaned girl after loosing her parents who lived in Californian desert in an vintage Spartan travel-trailer . -filmed with Polaroid film stock and Super-8 footage, overlaid with poetic voice over monoloque - this feature film creates a dynamic kaleidoscope of words and pictures, a dreamy tale that channels Terrence Malick, Gus Van Sant, and pages torn from a lonely girls journal (Palms Springs life magazine / Caroline Ryder) Stefanie Schneider By Caroline Ryder Travel up a bumpy dirt road in Morongo Valley, the trail strewn with rocks, and you’ll come upon a gigantic 1950s trailer in pristine condition, ringed by a white picket fence, with cottontail rabbits hopping among neat little rose bushes that bloom in spite of the broiling desert heat. Inside the trailer are period accents—a vintage radio, vintage fridge, little crocheted doilies and dusty gilt-framed photographs. It’s a surreal home-sweet-home, an Americana fantasy as imagined by German artist and experimental filmmaker Stefanie Schneider whose work is so inspired by the desert landscape, she made it her home in 2005. “There’s a completely different light here than in Germany, a beautiful light,” says Schneider, whose 10 acre property in Morongo is dotted with vintage trailers. They surround her midcentury home, and serve as sets for her photo shoots or as guest lodgings for her friends from Hollywood and Berlin. “But what I really love about the desert is the desolation,” she continues. “The sense of hope for something that might or might not come. It’s easy to see our dreams projected in the desert.” Famed for shooting trailer park chic fine art photographs exclusively on vintage Polaroid film, Schneider recently completed her most ambitious project to date—a feature film made entirely of Polaroid stills (4000 images in total), the story set around her magnificent 1950s trailer. The film, called “The Girl Behind The White Picket Fence” tells the story of a broken-hearted girl who lives in the trailer. Her name is Heather, and she is played by model Heather Megan Christie, girlfriend of actor Joaquin Phoenix, and former partner of Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, with whom she has a son. Heather stars opposite Kyle Larson (who plays ‘Hank’), a real-life gypsy fisherman who catches crab in Alaska when he’s not surfing in Southern California. Neither of the two had ever acted before, and never in the history of movie making has a director shot a film entirely on Polaroid film. “There was great difficulty shooting a film this way,” says Schneider, who, with her long straight hair, wide innocent eyes and thick-framed glasses, conjures an art-house Gretel. “If I had used a regular camera I would have had 36 exposures per minute, much faster and easier than using the old Polaroid camera which takes a long time to shoot one frame. Also, sometimes it doesn’t shoot at the exact moment you think it’s going to—but that’s really great because then you miss the perfect moment…and often those are the best shots.” Individually, the Polaroid photographs that comprise 29 PALMS, CA stand alone, but together and in sequence, filmed with super 8 and 16mm film stock and overlaid with poetic voice-over monologues, they create a dynamic kaleidoscope of words and pictures, a dreamy tale that channels Terrence Malick. Gus Van Sant, and pages torn from a lonely girl’s journal. The idea to shoot a movie in this way came about in 2004, when Schneider was working with leading German director Mark Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) on his film Stay. She had met Forster at director Wim Wender’s birthday party in Hollywood. A few years later, Forster asked Schneider to shoot Polaroids of scenes from Stay as he filmed; he used those photographs for dream and memory sequences in the movie. For the first time, Schneider saw her Polaroids strung together in sequence, moving with rhythm like a flipbook, in the context of a story. When Forster urged her to consider making a feature film using that technique, the seed of 29 PALMS, CA was sown. She mentioned the idea to her good friend German actor Udo Kier, who also gave the idea a big thumbs up, and agreed to play the part of a mysterious shaman in the film. Thanks to her strong reputation in the art world and her Hollywood connections, getting talented people on board was the easy part (for a while, Charlotte Gainsbourg was pegged to play the starring role, although she pulled out two weeks before shooting commenced because she was pregnant and not fit to travel to the desert.) The hard part was finding the perfect trailer—and bringing it to the desert. “This trailer almost killed us,” says Schneider’s partner Lance Waterman, who lives and works with Schneider in Morongo Valley. After finding it on eBay, the couple drove to Utah to pick it up, the plan being to tow it all the way back to the high desert themselves. Bad idea. “We were driving down a hill with this enormous trailer behind us when we realized that if we wanted to stop, there would be no way to do so without the trailer crushing us,” says Waterman. Adds Schneider: “Lance was even giving me instructions on how to jump out of the truck, if we needed to.” Thankfully the road leveled and as soon as they were able to slow down and pull over, they called a professional towing company, which transported the trailer the remaining distance to Morongo Valley. Filming took place in Spring 2011 and 2012. Schneider recently submitted the film to major film festivals in Europe and the US, and it will be broadcast in 2013 by leading German television channel, Arte. While Schneider may come from a long tradition of photographers-turned-filmmakers—Stanley Kubrick started out as a photographer, as did Ken Russell (Tommy, Women in Love...

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