In progress: 'To see the world...'
Petra Schneider, 29, is a free- lance German photographer. She is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Sean Scully and with Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf, having studied photography at the Academy of Photo Design earlier. She was invited to lead a Black and White Photography Workshop organised by the Goethe Institute Cairo/Alexandria recently.
Travelling and collecting sand from beaches all over the world, recording the emptiness and wideness of landscapes, has been representative of my work of the past two years. The small, invisible things we have come to overlook or totally ignore have to be picked up or made visible through magnifying glasses in the midst of a wide, unknown landscape. Recording the still life under one's feet interests me. Under microscope these details or fragments of the visible are suddenly transformed into shiny colours and assume bizarre physical silhouettes. Beaches and deserts are my favourite locations. I've been to Australia, Spain, France, the Canary Islands, Salmon Bay, Manly Bay, Palm Beach, Sahara, Costa Calma.
I'm a collector -- I don't hunt the photographic object with a fixed idea of how it has to become or for what purpose. I consider Henri Cartier Bresson a genius of moments captured in a frozen image. His photography resembles Albert Camus' existential narrative style, especially in The First Man, his last, fragmentary novel. The ravishing mood in Bresson's work, the silence and holding on to a moment fascinates me. His photos appear to be slow-motion images captured in between two dashes. I've become obsessed with this sort of visualisation; building a link between the environmental microcosm and our emotional one, capturing it in a moment.
My photographs at the exhibition at the Goethe Institute Gallery were similarly arranged: myself in front of a wide desert landscape, grains of sand under a microscope that reveals their beauty and a black and white technique that develops nostalgic images.
I started working out a multimedia basis for this "grain of sand project," including painting, sculpture, photography and installation after two years of collecting sand. The idea is to approach the shape of the sand through the eyes of both a photographer and a painter; to make it more spatial and thus multidimensional. The effects of different media are interchanged and complemented in an image.
I don't favour rapidly taken shots. My photographs try to remain in a moment or mood, letting the spectator ponder over them as long as possible.
The picture does not necessarily have to reveal itself, it keeps its secret behind the surface and within its particularities. When I shot the inhabitants of a charity girls' home in Munich it was a similar experience: approaching the face of the subject as carefully as possible. There is a personal attitude I have towards portraits. In my opinion you always find something of your own in portraits, you photograph yourself at the same time. Portraits resemble a voyage in, if you like, leaving the destination and what we will finally explore open. They somehow turn the inside out.
Voyeurism in an image is important to me; this thin red line separating me from my object while taking portraits. And there is so much you get from faces in front of your lens. This is why I consider it essential to give something in return for their frankness and uniqueness, for their faces; preserving their dignitiy in the image.
I saw the World Press Exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery: I will never be able to do this kind of photography, considering the themes of murder, illness, occupation, prostitution. But as long as it is revealing while exposing the emptiness of words, I find it morally justified to inform the public about things they will never otherwise experience or see with their own eyes. However, the truth of an image remains an inner, subjective one that is evoked in the spectator.
While studying in Tenerife I rediscovered the old photographic technique of gum bichromate, pioneered by John Pouncy in 1858, and was attracted by its pictorial and "ancient" character. The technique was made famous by the Pictorialists, especially Robert de Machy. It was characterised by an idea of freedom, for it demands immediate interference by human hands during the developing process. Escaping the tyranny of photography as an authentic image, as a final proof of reality, has always been controversial. The idea is to get rid of aestheticism's strict control and replace it by a more philosophical contextualisation, applying a unique value to the picture. I definitely favour this uniqueness and going back to the roots of photography by using natural materials; the sun as exposure and watercolour paper, for example.
I photograph theatre sets and play scenes in Germany, especially for the Prinzregenten Theatre in Munich and lately I have also shot discotheques in Sydney. The geometry of these places, the darkness surrounding them and the importance of light in the midst of a dark space are fascinating. When I was at Lanzarote, I favoured the panoramic view at Fundacion Manrique, a deserted house of grandiose architecture that has been turned into a museum. Cold lava enters the room from one of its great windows -- nature has got hold of the inside, has somehow recaptured its territory. That is the same idea of the exhibition at the Goethe Institute: inside out.
I am attending Thomas Ruff's classes in Düsseldorf now, while at the same time studying in Munich at the Academy of Fine Arts with Sean Scully. Ruff's famous Nude Series deals with voyeurism, alienating Net Pornography to a great extent and breaking through the binarism of spectator-spectacle by removing individual traits of the nudes' faces. There is no longer this dismal look of exploited subjects on their faces, because you don't see them anymore, while at the same time the body remains trapped in costumes and clichés.
In 2004 I will exhibit my work with Scully's class at Diozesan Museum in Freising and in a solo exhibition at Munich airport. I return to Germany with a memory of Cairo's vitality, its heat, the creative inside and chaotic outside and the calmness of its people -- their confidence that at the end of the day every problem will be solved.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 26 June - 2 July 2003 (Issue No. 644)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/644/cu2.htm