SEPTEMBER 22   |   2009   |    FEMININE MOMENTS    « Deep Lez

First Person Artist is a weekly column by artist Kimberly Brooks in which she provides commentary on the creative process and showcases artists' work from around the world. This week's featured artist is German-born photographer Stefanie Schneider.

I will never forget when my parents brought home their Poloroid SX-70 Camera. After "say cheese" we would grab the photo from its mouth and flap it around like angry chickens with the misguided belief that this would help it develop. Then, we watched the image appear like a magic trick before our very eyes. Little did we know then that the real magic would occur decades later, when the colors would fade in a yellow green haze and offer an aesthetic aftertaste even richer than the instant gratification of seeing it develop.

During my last show, "Mom's Friends," about my mother and her friends in the 70s, I foraged through old family albums and found page after delicious page of distorted photos that to me signified nothing less than the new born freedom of a generation redefining itself.

Kimberly Brooks: How are you mourning the news that Polaroid is discontinuing your medium?

Stefanie Schneider: It's an era ending again. No more family pictures developing in front of the children's eyes. A piece of beauty disappearing....a piece of culture. Polaroid material has the most beautiful quality -- the colors on one side, but then the magic moment in witnessing the image to appear. The time stands still and the act of watching the image develop can be shared with the people around you. In the fast world of today it's nice to slow down for a moment. At the same time Polaroid slows time, it also captures a moment which becomes the past so instantly that the decay of time is even more apparent-- it gives the image a certain sentimentality or melancholy. Because of that intensity of the moment it seems to change the interaction of the next moment. The Polaroid moment is one of a kind, an original every time.

SS: California always had been a dream to me. I guess growing up in the 70s with movies like Vanishing Point, The Getaway, and Badlands formed the need for me to leave Germany for California. I'd never even visited before I moved there. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 right away I felt at home. Everything was in place and the dream was alive. California looked it and the Polaroids made it even more real.

SS: It was all a coincidental life source. When I started taking polaroids I didn't even have a gallery. But I met gallerist Susanne Vielmetter about half a year after I started working with Polaroids and when I shuffled them out of a box onto the table. She loved them right away and we planned a show together.

KB: What is the ultimate subject for this medium?

SS: Love. There is no past, no future, no present. All seems to be happening at the same time. It breathes a senseless pain that has no place in the present. The ex-lover experiences the residues of love as an amputee experiences the sensation of a ghost limb. It is the tangible experience of "absence" that has inspired this piece below.

SS: I am more inspired by film, music and books. Like Days of Heaven, Badlands, 2046, The Last Picture Show, The Flaunder by Guenther Grass, the songs by Hildegard Knef and Serge Gainsbourg or Coco Rosie. I am also inspired by the 29 palms, California Group. We inspire each other.

Upcoming shows include:
"29 Palms, CA", Galerie Spesshardt-Klein, Berlin - 10th of February to 2nd of March 2008 - also shown at the Berlinale / Forum expanded
Les Rencontres d'Arles - Photo Festival South of France, 7th to 13th July 2008, curated by Christian Lacroix
Frenzy, Salzburger Festspiele, Sujet of the year presentation
Sidewinder, Galerie Robert Drees, Hannover, Germany
Sidewinder, c.art-Galerie, Bregenz, Austria

Stefanie Schneider is represented by Galerie Robert Drees in Hannover, Germany.