California - Landscape Photography

Biblioteca Gambalunga I Rimini, Italy 2022 In this photograph, a series of echoing doors serve as a portal into the interior of the Biblioteca Gambalunga in Rimini, Italy. One of ...

Card Index Bologna, Italy 2022 A classic card index with red and white labels, below a classical religious fresco and carved ceiling. signed and numbered ...

Laura Hawk, assistant to the Slim Aarons, relaxes by the pool at El Rincon, the von Pantz's Marbella home, September 1st, 1985. Slim Aarons Marbella Pool Chromogenic Lambda print Printed Later Slim Aarons Estate Edition Complimentary dealer shipping to your framer, worldwide. Stamped and hand numbered by the Slim Aarons Estate. Certificate of Authenticity included. Collector will get the next number in the edition Over the course of a career lasting half a century, Slim Aarons (1916-2006) portrayed high society, aristocracy, authors, artists, business icons, the celebrated and their milieu. In doing so, he captured a golden age of wealth, privilege, beauty and leisure that occurred alongside—but quite separate from—the cultural and political backdrop of the second half of the Twentieth Century. The Slim Aarons Estate has released the limited Estate edition as a Lambda print, which is a modern c-type prints. They have chosen Lambda prints for their sharpness, clarity, colour saturation and quality, compared to archival inkjet prints. Lambda printing gives true continuous tone. Photograph is unframed Slide show includes a close-up of the Slim Aarons estate's stamp. Collector will get the next number in the edition * We are pleased to offer the entire archive of the Slim Aarons Estate, offering the official Slim Aarons Estate Edition (only offered in this edition of 150). * Internal: Mid-Century Vintage Marbella...

Guests by the pool at Nelda Linsk's desert house in Palm Springs, January 1970. The house was designed by Richard Neutra for Edgar J. Kaufmann. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certific...

Card Index Bologna, Italy 2022 A classic card index with red and white labels, below a classical religious fresco and carved ceiling. signed and numbered ...

This mid-1980s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features Courchevel restaurant chefs Jean Jacob (left) of 'Le Bateau Ivre', Michel Rochedy (centre) ...

Guests round the pool at Las Hadas, Manzanillo, Mexico, 1974. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Numbered and stamped...

Gunzburg's pool at the Casa Las Estacas, in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, April 1979. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Number...

Skiers at Gstaad, Switzerland, 1969. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Numbered and stamped by the Slim Aarons Estate Collector will receive the next...

Title printed on front of mount.

Motorboats moored off the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes on the French Riviera, 1969. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Numbered and stamped by the...

Holidaymakers relax beside the swimming pool of Il Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, Tuscany, August 1980. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Numbered ...

Greek Temple, Pergamon Museum, Berlin 50 x 62.5 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 60 x 75 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 70 x 87.5 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed ...

This 1660 winter landscape photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features an individual skiing at Sugarbush, a mountain resort in Vermont, April 1960. This is an...

The mansion of Remy de Haenen on a peninsula in the bay of St. Jean at Eden Rock on the Caribbean island of St Barts (Saint-Barthelemy), March 1973. The house is now a hotel Slim Aa...

This mid-1970s photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features guests round the swimming pool at the Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc, Antibes, France, This is an estate st...

Biblioteca Marucelliana Florence, Italy 2022 62.5 x 50 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 75 x 60 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 87 x 70 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed and numbered on label, verso ...

The Polo World Cup at St Moritz, February 1989. Slim Aarons Estate Edition, Certificate of Authenticity included Numbered and stamped by the Slim Aarons Es...

This mid-1970s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features guests around the pool at Elephant Walk, Duncan McMartin's vil...

Breakfast on the verandah of the Chateau Saint-Martin, a luxury hotel in Vence on the Cote d'Azur, France, 1986. The building was once a Commanderie of the Knights Templar, dating ba...

Biblioteca Archiginnasio Bologna, Italy 2022 62.5 x 50 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 75 x 60 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 87 x 70 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed and numbered on label, verso ...

Biblioteca Archiginnasio Bologna, Italy 2022 62.5 x 50 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 75 x 60 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 87 x 70 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed and numbered on label, verso ...

Biblioteca Archiginnasio Bologna, Italy 2022 62.5 x 50 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 75 x 60 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 87 x 70 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed and numbered on label, verso Reinhard Görner records cultural and industrial heritage through his series of photographs depicting contemporary and historical architecture, landscapes, parks, and plants. Best known for his photographs of libraries and reading rooms from around the world—in works such as George Peabody Library II, Baltimore (2017) and Riggs Library I, Washington DC (2017)—Görner captures the atmosphere of absolute silence and concentration the spaces embody while also revealing their almost cathedral-like sense of grandeur. Görner’s images have a vivid sense of depth and dimension that convey an impression of intimacy, as in Isaac Newton, Cambridge (2017), or monumentality via his precise and skilful use of framing and perspective. This stunning photograph captures a vista through the storied volumes, intricately painted walls, and doorways inside the Biblioteca comunale dell'Archiginnasio (Archiginnasio Municipal Library). The Biblioteca Archiginnasio is a public library located inside the Palace of the Archiginnasio in Bologna, Italy. The largest library in Emilia-Romagna, it boasts some 850,000 volumes and pamphlets, 2,500 incunabula, 15,000 16th century editions, 8,500 manuscripts and then letters, collections of autographs, prints and drawings, and 250 archives. The library has also a section of 7,500 magazines. In 1838 a section of the building was destined to preserve the books collected from Napoleon's closure of the religious orders. Fabled patrons include the cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, Giovanni Gozzadini, Marco Minghetti, Giovanni Pascoli, Jacob Moleschott, Luigi Serra, Laura Bassi, Aurelio Saffi, Riccardo Bacchelli, Pelagio Palagi...

This late 1960s landscape photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features a couple walking on Caleta Beach holding hands, Acapulco, Mexico, 1968. This is an esta...

'Renée's Dream' no. 1 (Days of Heaven) - 2005 26 x 32 cm, Lumas Edition of 100, Artist Proof 4/4. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid Artist inventory 8088. Signature Label and...

Sunshades and sun loungers by the swimming pool at The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California, 1957. Beverly Hills Hotel Numbered and stamped by the Slim Aarons Estate. Cert...

Sunshades and sun loungers by the swimming pool at The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California, 1957. Beverly Hills Hotel Numbered and stamped by the Slim Aarons Estate. Cert...

This rich, vibrant Slim Aarons Estate Edition photograph depicts a swimming pool at the glamorous Villa Igiea, in the Sicilian cultural, economic and tourism capital of Palermo, on t...

Reinhard Görner Toreno Biblioteca del Senado, Madrid 2017 50 x 59.7 inches ed. of 10 $6,000 60 x 71.7 inches ed. of 7 $9,000 70 x 83.6 inches ed. of 5 $11,000 signed and numbered...

This mid-1970s photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features the seaside swimming pool at the Hotel Taormina in Taormina, Sicily, August 1975...

Women playing backgammon while sunbathing at the Habitation Leclerc pool, January 1975 Over the course of a career lasting half a century, Slim Aarons (1916-2006) portrayed high society, aristocracy, authors, artists, business icons, the celebrated and their milieu. In doing so, he captured a golden age of wealth, privilege, beauty and leisure, a history of glamour that occurred alongside—but quite separate from—the cultural and political backdrop of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Increasingly known for his influence, Aarons's casually glamorous jetset aesthetic can be seen today in fashion, art, and celebrity photography. Recent articles credit his work with inspiring the casually flawless style of top Instagram influencers, full of sunshine and escapism. Reference: "Dive in: how Slim Aarons art directed the poolside summer. French brand Maje are the latest label to take inspiration from Slim Aarons’ pictures of the jetset on holiday." Slim Aarons Backgammon by the pool...

Elote (Lost in Time) - 2019 Lost in Time The desert is not a lifeless dusty place. Abandoned places. Waiting…Suspended in time. 20x24cm, Edition of 7, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on a Polaroid. Signed on back with Certificate. Not mounted. Erin Dougherty...

Red striped Trailer (American Depression) - 2017 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inven...

Untitled (Cowboys and Angels), 2005 50x39cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. artist Inventory No....

Dani Geneux (left) and Marie-Eugenie Gaudfrin sunbathing at the Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc, Antibes, France, August 1976. Aarons' iconic photograph depicts the legendary hotel made famous by Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, the sun-kissed home away from home for titans of literature and music (Cole Porter, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stefan Zweig, Noël Coward), film (Marlene Dietrich, Alain Delon, Elizabeth Taylor, who brought all of her husbands there, and every Hollywood A-lister in town for Cannes), art (Chagall, Picasso, Matisse), music (John and Yoko, Jane and Serge, Ella Fitzgerald), politics (Churchill, De Gaulle, the Kennedys), and high society (the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson). Two female bathers in black sunhats enjoy a holiday in bikini and topless styles, against the rocks. Numbered and stamped by the Slim Aarons...

A woman running towards the ocean on a beach in Bermuda, 1957. The bather wears a vintage coral red swimsuit, which provides a pop of color against the sun-dappled turquoise waves. F...

'Untitled' (Oilfields) - 2004 60x60cm, Edition of 10, analog C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 1219.04, Not mounted. OILF...

Holding on Tight (Chicks and Chicks and sometimes Cocks) - 2016 Edition of 10, 49x58cm, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid Artist inventory 19522.02 Not mounted. Signature la...

Curlers on a rink, or curling sheet, in St Moritz, Switzerland, March 1963. Slim Aarons Pool on the Amalfi Coast Chromogenic Lambda Print Slim Aarons ...

Curlers on a rink, or curling sheet, in St Moritz, Switzerland, March 1963. Slim Aarons Pool on the Amalfi Coast Chromogenic Lambda Print Slim Aarons ...

Guests by the pool at Nelda Linsk's desert house in Palm Springs, January 1970. The house was designed by Richard Neutra for Edgar J. Kaufmann Over the course of a career lasting ha...

Slim Aarons' Rowing Off Sicily, an Estate Edition photograph, is a vintage scene of two couples out rowing off the coast of Sicily, Italy, near Taorm...

'Salt'n Sea' (California Badlands) - 2006 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 4536.08, Not mou...

A woman combing her hair by a waterfall at Rose Hall, Jamaica, December 1971. Visual description: A tanned white woman smiles and combs her long brown hair by a waterfall at Rose H...

Hide-out (American Depression) - 2017 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 20113...

Leonard Dalsemer and his family at their villa in Lyford Cay, New Providence Island, April 1974. This image features a classic Slim Aarons contrast: between the manmade and the beauty of nature. It's an expertly composed scene of midcentury glamour that still feels casual and light. The azure blue of the sky contrasts with the deeper blues and aquas of the sea, and the sparkling turquoise of the pool. While human figures anchor the scene, the expertly captured contrast of natural grandeur and architectural geometry make this scene truly magnificent. Image Description: In the background, leafy green palm trees and other trees blow in the breeze before a bright azure sky and slightly deeper blue ocean surf. In the foreground, two couples walk the pool deck in pastel pink and green clothing. Three children play in the turquoise pool. A verdant green hedge lines the front of the image, anchored by seven white florals in white pots. In the background is a pool cabana...

Wallscape III by Frank Schott 48 x 64 inches (122 x 163cm) edition of 7 signed 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102cm) edition of 25 signed archival fine art pigment print printed under artis...

High Voltage (American Depression) - 2017 “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath 24x20cm, Edition of ...

A poolside party at a desert house, designed by Richard Neutra for Edgar J. Kaufmann, in Palm Springs, January 1970. Featured in the group are: industrial designer Raymond Loewy (189...

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

This late 1950s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features Marsha Gayle of Paris enjoying a deserted beach near Calabash Bay, Andros, Bahamas. This ...

This late 1950s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features Marsha Gayle of Paris enjoying a deserted beach near Calabash Bay, Andros, Bahamas. This ...

Desert Living (California Dreaming) - 2017 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 21292. Not mounted. The simplicity of 'flawed beauty' comes from the expired film I use to create a reflection of love and loneliness.
 The dream is actually turning into a nightmare. It's easier to deny than to utter the truth of defeat. (ruin). 
That we are all finite is irrefutable but we just don't want to believe it. I chose Polaroid film because it portrays color like candy making...

Desert Living (California Dreaming) - 2017 40x48cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invento...

Holidaymakers relax beside the swimming pool of Il Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, Tuscany, August 1980. Slim Aarons 'Il Pellicano Hotel, Porto Ecole' Il Pellicano, Porto Ercole, Tuscany, Italy Chromogenic Lambda print Printed Later Slim Aarons Estate Edition Complimentary dealer shipping to your framer, worldwide. Stamped and hand numbered by the Slim Aarons Estate. Certificate of Authenticity included. 60 x 40 inches $3950 40 x 30 inches $3350 30 x 20 inches $3000 Complimentary dealer shipping to your framer, worldwide. Over the course of a career lasting half a century, Slim Aarons (1916-2006) portrayed high society, aristocracy, authors, artists, business icons, the celebrated and their milieu. In doing so, he captured a golden age of wealth, privilege, beauty and leisure that occurred alongside—but quite separate from—the cultural and political backdrop of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Photograph is unframed Slide show includes a close-up of the Slim Aarons estate's stamp. Collector will get the next number in the edition * We are pleased to offer the entire archive of the Slim Aarons Estate, offering the official Slim Aarons Estate Edition (only offered in this edition of 150). * Undercurrent Projects, New York, is proud to represent Aarons' full collection of negatives and transparencies. Housed at Getty Images Hulton Archive in London, The Slim Aarons Estate has released the limited Estate edition as a Lambda print, which is a modern c-type prints. They have chosen Lambda prints for their sharpness, clarity, colour saturation and quality, compared to archival inkjet prints. Lambda printing gives true continuous tone. Internal: Slim Aarons, Porto Ercole, Italy, Il Pelicano, Vintage Glamour, 70s...

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...

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