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Stefanie Schneider10525 (Stranger than Paradise, ) Edition 8/10 - 5 analog C-Prints1999
1999
About the Item
Stranger than Paradise – 10525 (1999)
Edition 9/10
Five analog C-prints, each 57 × 56 cm, hand-printed by the artist from the five Polaroids.
Installation dimensions (with gaps): 57 × 308 cm
Unframed. Certificate of authenticity and signed inventory label (Artist Inventory No. 338.09)
Exhibited at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in 2001. Included in the exhibition: two photographs of the artist standing before the full installation — a quiet moment of gravity before a work that helped define a movement.
Stefanie Schneider: Stranger Than Paradise — Stranger Than Fiction
Stefanie Schneider’s Stranger than Paradise is more than a series of photographs. It is a sun-bleached fever dream born on the outer edges of the American West — a West not of mythic conquest, but of crumbling dreams and unspoken longing. These five images, bathed in the distinctive chemical bloom of expired Polaroid film, suggest not a story told but one remembered, hazily, as if through heat shimmer and heartbreak.
Made in 1999 and printed in Berlin, these works are relics of a vanished time — moments resurrected through patience, chemistry, and intuition. There are no digital shortcuts here. Only the steady hand of an artist who knew, long before the world did, that the soul of photography lived not in perfection, but in the tension between memory and material. In her custom laboratory/studio (Labudio), Schneider replicated and enlarged her Polaroids by hand.
The series premiered at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects at the dawn of the new millennium — a fitting stage for a work that marked a turning point not just in Schneider’s career, but in the life of Polaroid film itself.
A German View of the American West
Born in Germany in 1968, Stefanie Schneider has spent decades crafting a visual language entirely her own — somewhere between Edward Hopper’s loneliness, Ed Ruscha’s cool Americana, and David Lynch’s dangerous nostalgia. Her work captures the contradictory pulse of the West: freedom and isolation, desire and decay. Like Georgia O’Keeffe’s deserts, Schneider’s landscapes are vast and unforgiving, yet deeply intimate — populated by half-dressed strangers, motel ghosts, and time itself.
But Schneider is no mere witness. She is part of the terrain. Working primarily in the California desert, she shoots her subjects in cinematic tableaux, then returns to her Berlin darkroom to breathe life into the images using aged, nearly extinct Polaroid stock.
The Woman Who Helped Save Polaroid
In a time when instant film was being quietly buried, Schneider was already mourning its disappearance — and fighting for its survival. Her persistent, poetic use of expired Polaroid stock became a rallying cry for analog romantics and ultimately caught the eye of Florian "Doc" Kaps, who credited Schneider's art as one of the sparks that led him to rescue the last Polaroid factory in the world in 2008. Her art didn’t just preserve memory — it preserved a medium.
Love, Loss, and the Beautiful Collapse
“The tangible experience of absence is what has inspired my work,” Schneider once said. Her art is haunted not by ghosts, but by what could have been. Her models — often alone, sometimes together but disconnected — inhabit a world that is crumbling quietly at the edges. Nothing explodes. Everything fades.
“My work resembles my life,” she told Artnet in 2014. “Love, lost and unrequited, leaves its mark in our lives as a senseless pain that has no place in the present.”
There is no better metaphor for this than expired Polaroid film — emulsion surrendering to entropy. In Stefanie’s hands, even chemical failure becomes poetry.
Before Instagram, There Was Stefanie Schneider
Long before Valencia and Amaro and Mayfair made nostalgia into a trend, Stefanie Schneider was creating entire worlds in a single frame — analog, unpredictable, emotionally raw. She didn’t need filters. She had patience, instinct, sunlight, and chemistry. And she had the nerve to let things fall apart beautifully.
Stranger than Paradise isn’t just a series. It’s an origin story — of a singular artist who made us see the American West not as it was, but as it felt. And sometimes, feeling is the only truth we can trust.
- Creator:Stefanie Schneider (1968, German)
- Creation Year:1999
- Dimensions:Height: 22.45 in (57 cm)Width: 121.26 in (308 cm)Depth: 0.12 in (3 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Morongo Valley, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU652316376262
Stefanie Schneider
Stefanie Schneider received her MFA in Communication Design at the Folkwang Schule Essen, Germany. Her work has been shown at the Museum for Photography, Braunschweig, Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin, the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt, the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Museum für Moderne Kunst Passau, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Foto -Triennale Esslingen., Bombay Beach Biennale 2018, 2019.
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