Stefanie Schneider Nude Photography

Please (Sidewinder) - 2005 20x24cm, Edition 1/10. Digital C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 3391. Not mounted. "private history...

The Girl II (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - 2011 128x125cm. Edition of 5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and certif...

Silence then (Sidewinder), 2005 Edition of 1/10, 40x50cm, digital C-Print based on an expired Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider: A German ...

You turn from Me (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x20cm, Edition 1/10, digital C-Print print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 9555.01...

Judith (Suburbia) - 2004 50x60cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on a Polaroid, Signed on verso with Certificate, Artist inventory number: 1698. Not mounted. Stefanie S...

Untitled (Paradise) - 1999 50x50cm. Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 18550. N...

Blue House' (29 Palms, CA) - 1998, triptych Edition 4/25, 38x37cm each, together installed 38 x 125cm with gaps. Analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist, based on the 3 origi...

Jungle Boy (Back in the 80's) - 1999 48x46cm, Edition of 10. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventor...

Fugitives III (Till Death do us Part) - 2005, 20x24cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 9363....

She need not move (Sidewinder) - 2005 24x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label and certificate. Artist Inventory 3298...

A Room with no View (Burned) - 1999 40x39cm, Edition 2/10, Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No 21238.02. Not mo...

Become Aware (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - 2013 20x24cm, Edition 8/10. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory # 15...

Maria Magdalena (Sidewinder), 2005 Edition of 1/10, 50x40cm, digital C-Print based on an expired Polaroid photograph. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. Stefanie Schnei...

Strange Math (The Princess and her Lover) - 2007 part of the 29 Palms, CA project. Edition of 10, 20x24cm. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certif...

Burned (Self Portrait), 1999 Edition of 2/10, 20x20cm Print on Velvet Watercolor, 310gsm, No OBAs, Bright White, Acid Free based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. N...

Planet of the Apes X - 1999, Edition 1/10, 40x40cm. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted, Stefanie Schneider — The Alchemy of T...

The Games we played (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 artist proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, art...

You turn from Me (Till Death do us Part) - 2005, 20x20cm, Edition 1/10, digital C-Print print, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 9555.01....

Sundays (Heavenly Falls) - 2016 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Digital C-Print based on a Polaroid. Certificate and signature label, artist inventory number: 19502. Not mounted. Stefani...

Tropics Motor Motel I (Memories of Green) - 1999 58x56cm, Edition 1/10, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on a Polaroid, Artist inven...

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

Crack in the Wall (Till Death do us Part), - 2005, LAST EDITION 24x20cm, sold out Edition of 10, Artist Proof 2/2, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signatu...

Burned (Self Portrait), 1999 Edition of 2/10, 20x20cm Print on Velvet Watercolor, 310gsm, No OBAs, Bright White, Acid Free based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Not ...

Wild Things (Till Death Do Us Part) - 2005, 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inven...

Wild Things (Till Death Do Us Part) - 2005, 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inven...

Fugitives (Till Death do us Part) - 2005, 20x24cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 9377. Not...

The Games we played (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 50x50cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 artist proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 9273. Not mounted. on offer is a piece from the movie "Till Death do us Part" Stefanie Schneider’s Till...

Girl Nude II (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 40x39cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Signature label and Certificate. Artist inventory Numb...

Crack in the Wall (Till Death do us Part), - 2005, LAST EDITION 24x20cm, sold out Edition of 10, Artist Proof 2/2, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signatu...

Wild Things (Till Death Do Us Part) - 2005, 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invento...

Untitled 01 (Saigon) - 2003 Edition 2/5, 57x58cm, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, matte surface, based on a Polaroid. Artist Inventory Nu...

Male Nude VI (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 58x56cm, Edition of 10, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist inventory numbe...

'Fairy' (Heavenly Falls) - 2016 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid, Certificate and signature label artist inventory number: 19719, Not mounted. The ...

Male Nude in Motel II (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 - 30x40cm, Edition of 10. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. . Artist Inventory No. 2777. “It ...

The Games we played (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 50x50cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 artist proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, art...

Musing (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 24x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 artist proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, artist Invento...

The Games we played (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. ...

Daisy in front of Trailer (Till Death Do Us Part) - 2005 Edition 4 of 5, 125x123 cm. Analog C-Print, printed on Fuji Cristal Archive Paper, hand-printed by the artist, based on an expired Polaroid. Signature label and certificate. Artist inventory 9250.04. Not mounted. Note: the addional images show the edition 3/5 mounted (sold). Stefanie Schneider’s Till Death Do Us Part or “There is Only the Desert for You.” BY DREW HAMMOND Stefanie Schneider’s Til Death...

Fighting Back the Darkness - 2011 from the Daisy McCrackin Record Shoot 'God Willing' 30x40cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroi...

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

After the Dance (Sidewinder) - 2005 50x40cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 32...

The Princess Kiss (The Princess and her Lover), 2009, Edition of 2/5, 100x98cm analog C-Print based, printed by the artist, on a Polaroid, not mounted, Signature label and Certi...

Untitled (Paradise) - 1999, 20x20cm. Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 18550. No...

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

Wheel Chair Corridor (Burned) - 1999 Edition of 10, 40x40cm Analog hand print, on Velvet Watercolor, 310gsm, No OBAs, Bright White, Acid Free based on the Polaroid. Signature labe...

Tropics Motor Motel II (Memories of Green) - 1999 Edition 1/10, 58x56cm. ANALOG C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the Polaroid. Artist i...

Untitled (Paradise) - 1999, 20x20cm. Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 20452. 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, that 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 have 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...

Happy Days (Till Death do Us part) - 2005 20x20cm, sold out Edition of 10, this is Artist Proof 2/2. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Arti...

Shooting Range (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 20x20cm, Edition 8/10, Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, Artist Inventory # 9487. Not mounted...

Judith (Suburbia) - 2004 20x24cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print based on a Polaroid, Signed on verso with Certificate, Artist inventory number: 1698. Not mounted. This proje...

Vivienne VII (Desert Nudes) - 2016 - 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. digital C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature l...

'Prom Nights' (Till Death Do Us part) - 2005 20x20cm, sold out Edition of 10, this is Artist Proof 2/2. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. a...

Narween (Saigon) - 2003 58x56cm, Edition 2/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid. Mounted on Aluminum with matte UV-Protection. Artist in...

Now I’m Here and Now I’m Gone II - 2011 from the Daisy McCrackin Record Shoot 'God Willing' 30x40cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original P...

Whisky and Water (Sidewinder) - 2005 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label and certificate. Artist Inventory 3292....

Moments in Time (Sidewinder) - 2005 25x30cm, Edition 3/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the original Polaroid. Signature lab...

'You, the desert and me' (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) 125x150cm, Edition of 5, Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Sign...

Untitled (Paradise) - 1999, 50x50cm. Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 18550. No...