Continental US - Landscape Photography

Sunset (Zuma Beach) - 1999 20x25cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artists Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Artist Inventory # 119. Not mount...

Into Eternity (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 893. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. For sale is a piece from the Wastelands series. Reality with the Tequila: Stefanie Schneider’s Fertile Wasteland by James Scarborough “How much more than enough for you for I for both of us darling?” (E. E. Cummings) Until he met her, his destiny was his own. Petty and inconsequential but still his own. He was cocksure and free, young and unaccountable, with dark hair and aquiline features. His expression was always pensive, a little troubled, but not of a maniacal sort. He was more bored than anything else. With a heart capable of violence. Until she met him, she was pretty but unappreciated. Her soul had registered no seismic activity. Dustbowl weary, she’d yet to see better days. A languorous body, a sweet face with eyes that could be kind if so inclined. Until she met him, she had not been inclined. It began when he met her. She was struck in an instant by his ennui. The sum of their meeting was greater than the imbroglios and chicaneries of their respective existences. He was struck by the blank slate look in her eyes. They walked, detached and focused on the immediate, obscenely unaware of pending change across a terrain of mountainous desert, their eyes downcast and world-weary, unable to account for the buoyant feeling in her heart. His hard-guy shtick went from potentiality to ruse. The gun was not a weapon but a prop, a way to pass time. Neither saw the dark clouds massing on the horizon. They found themselves alone in the expanses of time, unaware of the calamity that percolated even as they posed like school kids for the pictures. Happiness brimmed in that wild terrain. Maybe things were beginning to look up. That’s when the shooting started… Stefanie Schneider assumes that our experience of lived reality (buying groceries, having a relationship with someone, driving a car) does not correspond to the actual nature of lived reality itself, that what we think of as reality is more like a margarita without the tequila. Stefanie Schneider’s reality is reality with the tequila. She does not abolish concepts that orient us, cause and effect, time, plot, and storyline, she just plays with them. She invites us to play with them, too. She offers us a hybrid reality, more amorphous than that with a conventional subject, verb, and predicate. Open-ended, this hybrid reality does not resolve itself. It frustrates anyone with pedestrian expectations but once we inebriate those expectations away, her work exhilarates us and even the hangover is good. An exploration of how she undermines our expectation of what we assume to be our lived reality, the reasons why she under- mines our expectations, and the end result, as posited in this book, will show how she bursts open our apparatus of perception and acknowledges life’s fluidity, its density, its complexity. Its beauty. She undermines expectations of our experience of reality with odd, other-worldly images and with startling and unexpected compressions and expansions of time and narrative sequence. The landscape seems familiar enough, scenes from the Old West: broad panoramic vistas with rolling hills dotted with trees and chaparral, dusty prairies with trees and shrubs and craggy rocks, close-up shots of trees. But they’re not familiar. These mis-en-scenes radiate an unsettling Picasso Blue Period glow or the intense celestial blue of the cafe skies that Van Gogh painted in the south of France. Yellow starbursts punctuate images as if seen through the viewfinder of a flying saucer. At the same time, objects appear both vintage and futuristic, the landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. Landscapes change seemingly at random as do the seasons. Stefanie Schneider offers no indication of how time flows here, except that it conceivably turns in on itself and then goes its merry way. Time is a river whose source is a deep murky spring which blusters about with an occasional swirling eddy. That Stefanie Schneider thwarts an easy reading is obvious but why does she do this? Since she will not countenance anything linear, logical, or sequential, and because she does not relish anything concrete and specific, she has to roil things up a bit. Nor does she seem comfortable with a book of images that is settled, discrete, and accountable. Instead she wants to create a panoply of anxious moments...

"I like to go back to a place. Seasons change. Light, which is theater, changes. Nature is tumultuous, and our contact with it makes life happen.” - David H. Gibson David H. Gibso...

Chaco Terada, originally from Japan, was trained at a young age in the art of calligraphy. When Chaco was in her twenties she had the opportunity to work on her calligraphy in ten co...

ABOUT THIS PIECE: Blurring the lines between reality and abstraction Luca searches for rich textures, patiently waiting for the subtle moment when the soft lighting or harsh contrast...

ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Niall Staines is a digital artist based in Ireland. His work is graphic, vibrant and visually arresting. Nature is a consistent theme in his work, often turning se...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

Maggie Taylor creates evocative single-scene narratives in her whimsical and often elaborate photomontages. Working intuitively, Taylor combines 19th Century photographs, found objec...

Artist: Lee Friedlander, American (1934 - ) Title: Tarrytown Year: 2001, Printed 2002 Medium: Silver Gelatin Print, Signed in pencil verso Size: 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.64 cm) Frame S...

The Mountain (Stranger than Paradise) - 2003 57x56cm, Edition 4/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the Polaroid. Artist invento...

Skiers in Zermatt, Switzerland, March 1968. Slim Aarons Zermatt Skiing 1968 C print (Printed later) Estate signature stamped and hand numbered edition of 150 with certificate of au...

The Getaway (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 23256. Signature label and...

ADDITIONAL SIZES AND FRAMING: Additional sizes are available. Please inquire for more information on larger sizes. We offer fully archival professional framing for all prints for an ...

Mirages. The idea of the monumental, utopian and modern city is constantly debated due to its own fragility. The idealization of the city is weak and vulnerable, threatened by the ru...

These photos were shown at the exhibition 'A Fatal Pass at the Wolfsonian FIU Museum in 2015'. The Exhibition was part of Myth and Machine: The First World War in Visual Culture cura...

Hidden Valley (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 1992. Signature label a...

House up in the Mountains (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 1235. Signat...

Untitled (Fairytales) - 2006, 49x48cm, Edition 2/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, matte finish, based on the original Polaroid. Certi...

Blue Day (Wastelands) - 2003 38x37cm, Edition 2/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 837. Signature label and c...

"Titans of Time" The world’s two largest tusked elephants, Tim & Craig, can go months without crossing paths so seeing the two together is one of the most extraordinary sights in th...

Magic Hour (Musica Poetica) - 1999 Edition 3/10, 44x59cm. Analog C-Print, hand-printed and enlarged by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Certificat...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

This late 1960s landscape photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features holidaymakers relaxing on a beach in Bermuda. This is an estate stamped and hand numbere...

THIS PIECE IS AVAILABLE FRAMED. Please reach out to the gallery for additional information. ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Ludwig Favre is an artist with a keen awareness for aesthetics and i...

Summer Cat, 2007 by Hank Gans, is a 19” x 13” black-and-white photograph of a white cat on a dusty road in upstate New York. On a lazy summer day the cat fol...

Seagulls (Zuma Beach) - 1999 20x25cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artists Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Artist Inventory # 107. Not mou...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

Lifeguard (Zuma Beach) - 1999 20x25cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artists Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature Label and Certificate. Artist Inventory #499. Not mou...

"Tulle no. 54, Taos, NM" is a color photograph, limited edition, signed and numbered by Thomas Jackson. Thomas Jackson's Emergent Behavior is inspired by the instinctual self-organi...

"Silk no. 4_v1, Taos, NM" is a color photograph, limited edition, signed and numbered by Thomas Jackson. Thomas Jackson's Emergent Behavior is inspired by the instinctual self-organ...

Fall (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inv...

ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Niall Staines is a digital artist based in Ireland. His work is graphic, vibrant and visually arresting. Nature is a consistent theme in his work, often turning se...

30"x40" photograph, signed on reverse by the artist, edition of 5 Sasha Bezzubov’s photographic approach has developed through diverse series that address the contemporary condition and explore the nature of the document. Working both solo and with his sometime collaborator Jessica Sucher, Sasha Bezzubov uses a large format camera to photograph the people and the land in diverse series including, The Gringo Project, Expats and Natives, Things Fall Apart, The Searchers, Albedo Zone, Facts on the Ground and most recently, Republic of Dust. Bezzubov is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship Award. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts (Liege, Belgium); Tucson Museum of Art; Museum Belvedere (The Netherlands); Herter Art Gallery (University of Massachusetts); Wavehill (New York); New Orleans Museum of Art; and Noorderlicht Photography Festival (The Netherlands). In 2009 Nazraelli Press published Bezzubov’s monograph Wildfire (introduction by Bill McKibben). In 2011 Daniel Cooney...

"I like to go back to a place. Seasons change. Light, which is theater, changes. Nature is tumultuous, and our contact with it makes life happen.” - David H. Gibson David H. Gibso...

Edward Ranney is an internationally recognized photographer who has photographed the natural and man-altered landscape for over forty years. The Andean coastal desert of southern...

THIS PIECE IS AVAILABLE FRAMED. Please reach out to the gallery for additional information. ABOUT THIS PIECE: French photographer Ludwig Favre recently road tripped to California. ...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

Street Spirit (Bombay Beach, CA) - 2022 20x20cm. Edition of 7 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the original Polaroid. Signature label with certificate. Artist Inv...

Up up and away - 2008 40x40cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artis...

This late 1960s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features guests at a party at the home of Sebastiano Bergese in Marbella, Spain. This is an estate...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

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

Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti depicts nature, eroded and broken down by civilization, but does not put man and the environment in opposite camps. He sees an equal relations...

The hovering installations featured in this ongoing series of photographs are inspired by self-organizing, "emergent" systems in nature such as termite mounds, swarming locusts, scho...

The artwork employs collage to fuse the ornate features of traditional architecture with stark modernist geometry. This duality within the piece highlights the city's journey through...

The artist inspiration is deeply rooted in the notion of discovery through visual reflections and a strong passion for symmetry and linear structure. Her architectural works of Refle...

THIS PIECE IS AVAILABLE FRAMED. Please reach out to the gallery for additional information. ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Desert born and raised, fashion photographer Natasha Wilson has had ...

Plane Mirage (Stranger than Paradise) - 2008 40x40cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inven...

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. East River View (Stay) - 2006 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 2598. Not mounted. Torsten Scheid, “Fotografie, Kunst, Kino. Revisited.”, FilmDienst 3/2006, page 11-13

 Photography Art Cinema. Revisited Stay expands a traditional connection through new facets interwoven between the media of photography and film is a veritable mesh-work of technical, motific, metaphorical and personal interrelationships. Extending from photo-film which, as in La Jetée by Chris Marker (France, 1962) is a montage of single, unmoving photographs all the way to the portrayal of photographic motifs in Hollywood cinema―most recently in Memento (USA, 2000) and One hour photo (USA, 2002)―is the range of filmic-photographic interactions on the one hand, and from the adaption of modes of cinematic production to the imitation of film stills on the other. For instance, with the legendary Untitled Film Stills (1978) of the American artist Cindy Sherman, who later made her debut as a film director with Office Killer (USA, 1997) and thereby, like many others, changed sides: Wim Wenders, Robert Frank and Larry Clark are doubtlessly the most successful of these photographic-filmic border crossers. This brief survey provides only a vague indication of the dimensions of this intermedial field, which in fact extends much further and is constantly being cultivated. Also as a motif in film, photography has experienced a historical transformation: Photographers were once considered to be technicians who mastered a craft but never achieved the status of artists. Photographer-figures were caught in the allure of beautiful appearance, incapable of penetrating to the actual essence of things. Such depth was reserved for literature or painting. When photography in film touched upon the sphere of art, then most often as its contrasting model, as the metaphor for a superficial access to the world. Coming to mind are Fred Astaire as a singing fashion photographer in Stanley Donen’s musical film Funny Face (USA, 1957), or the restless lifestyle-photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s genre-classic Blow up (GB, 1966). For the doubting Thomas, only that exists which can be photographed. He ultimately enters the world of fantasy and thereby the field of art only unwillingly, when he becomes entangled in the world of his images. The last of his detail-enlargements shows only the photographic grain and has lost all connection to reality. The photograph looks as if it had been painted by Bill, the painter who is both friend and antagonist to the protagonist.

 Photography as Art It was first around the end of the last century that numerous filmmakers discovered photography as a genuine art form. In The Bridges of Madison County (USA, 1995) a sensitive Clint Eastwood stands, camera in hand, on the threshold of artistic status, and in Smoke (USA, 1994) a tobacco merchant ripens into a philosopher through his involvement in photography. Finally, in John Water’s parody of the art market, Pecker (USA, 1998), a provincial tom-fool is hyped into celebrated stardom amid the New York art scene because of his blurred snapshots. This film about a postmodern Kaspar Hauser in photographic art (with clear parallels to Richard Billingham, the British shooting...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

Kate Breakey's artistic process is an act of investigation – a passionate attempt to establish an understanding of the natural world – a version that incorporates both intellectual a...

"Tulle no. 52" is a color photograph, limited edition, signed and numbered by Thomas Jackson. Thomas Jackson's Emergent Behavior is inspired by the instinctual self-organizing syste...

"I like to go back to a place. Seasons change. Light, which is theater, changes. Nature is tumultuous, and our contact with it makes life happen.” - David H. Gibson David H. Gibson ...

Neighborhood Garden (Suburbia) - 2004 60x80cm, Edition of 1/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid, mounted on Aluminum with matte UV-Projection. Artist Inventory No. 405.01. Signed on verso. The project "Suburbia" was shot on the set of Marc Forster's first feature film 'Everything put Together' with Radha Mitchell, Michelle Hicks, Megan Mullally, Catherine Lloyd Burns, Matt Malloy and others. Suburbs collectively, or the people who live in them Suburb { a district, especially a residential one, on the edge of a city or large town } synonyms [Outer edge , Fringes, Periphery, Limits, Outer reaches, Environs ] Sunday in suburbia, a summer's day heavy with heat, hardly a soul to be seen. As a result, the motifs of Stefanie Schneider's “Suburbia” cycle – put together in California, in the very west of the USA – are virtually inconspicuous.Schneider's camera encircles an idyllic American setting, capturing a garden practically empty of people. Surrounded by a white picket fence, flowers and trees bloom profusely in the blazing sunlight. The day is empty and quiet like only a Sunday can be. The grass is perfectly cut, the garden well tended, the inhabitants oblivious to everything and lethargic. An instant is seized, revealing the tragedy of an average, unsuccessful, middle class life. The scene is familiar from countless movies and American literature; the perfect façade of an American ideal, which seems to conceal the horror of daily life. In David Lynch's „Blue Velvet“ the film begins with the camera rolling over a similar setting: the view over the fence, the painstakingly neatly cut lawn, ending with a close-up: a cut-off ear covered with feasting ants. Stefanie Schneider overdoes it, she exaggerates: this is confirmed by the irritating colourfulness as well as the vehemence of the motifs. Emptiness stands in stark contrast to the beauty of the blooming roses or the lush growth of the trees. The fenced, idyllic summer scene appears vacant; unused chairs surround a table, the grill untouched and clean, no object out of place. It is only the inhabitants who appear curiously lost. Schneider shows them in the middle of their saturated lives, in well-tended averageness, which can only be endured with a Martini on ice, on hand before lunch. In her opinion the scenes are banal, yet one becomes witness to great intimacy. Schneider's „Suburbia“ cycle lives from the interplay of the motifs, and tells a story with the same flavour as American author Raymond Carver...

These extraordinary photographs are part of the the Hotel Chelsea series. The Hotel Chelsea closed its doors for the first time in its iconic history of over one hundred years. Amer...

"I like to go back to a place. Seasons change. Light, which is theater, changes. Nature is tumultuous, and our contact with it makes life happen.” - David H. Gibson David H. Gibson ...

Père Lachaise - 1995 Edition of 5, plus 2 Artist Proofs. 60x50cm including white borders. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist and based on the original Polaroid, Signatu...

My own private Travel Diary - Bishop, CA - Autumn - 2001, 20x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a 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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