Skylark (Musica Poetica) - 1997

Edition 1/5,
44x59cm.
Analog C-Print, hand-printed and enlarged by the artist, based on the Polaroid.
Certificate and Signature label.
Artist Inventory #143.01.
Not mounted.

The Tooth of Time (Falk Schreiber, u-magazine)

It is obvious that the artist Stefanie Schneider has a background in film. All her pictures live from the dust-filled eroticism of American road movies. For Hitchhikers, the thirty-seven-year-old artist sent her protagonists into the desert.

The air shimmers. Desert. A highway, massive autos, dusty kisses. One is familiar with these sorts of images from films, even if one hasn't yet seen this particular one. In any case, it seems to be older: The tooth of time has gnawed at the photos; they are discolored, strangely and incorrectly exposed, covered with white spots.

False! The photographic series Hitchhikers was created this year; the photos got their patina because the photographer Stefanie Schneider only uses film which has passed its expiration date by up to five years, and which accordingly reacts to light in unpredictable ways. Where one's assumptions are correct is in the matter of the cinematic allusions: Schneider received a degree in film at the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen and was a cutter for several years. In the USA, she was responsible for the scene photos in the feature-film debut (Everything put together) of Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) and out of tha collaboration developed her own photographic series Suburbia.

Hitchhikers is similarly structured and actually consists of stills, in this case without the accompanying film: loosely staged pictures in which the protagonists have space for spontaneous improvisations. No plot, but moods which seem familiar to us. Schneider remarks that during the shooting she was thinking of Thelma and Louise....