Stefanie Schneider - 10525 (Stranger than Paradise)

Original photograph by German photographer Stefanie Schneider (*1968), artist Inventory Nr. 338.

PROCESS: digital C-Print on RC photographic paper
AGE / period: 1999
DIMENSIONS: 20 x 20 cm each
CONDITION: in excellent condition

...Finally, a quintych entitled 10525, after the address on front of one of the buildings, depicts a woman and a shop front. To her right is a man on the phone in a telephone box, to her left, a billowing American flag. Five emotional hieroglyphs in search of syntax. Not as cosmic as John Baldessari, but in the same vein.

The real story of this show is the play of time. Schneider first shoots scores of images with expired Polaroid stock, hence, each yellowing image is stained with chemical burns and starbursts and a phosphorescent blue. Indeed, in the first mentioned piece, the effect resembles the opening credits of Bonanza when the map of the Ponderosa bursts into flame. The artist then combs through her cluster of snaps to create a storyboard of a few choice images, and then re-prints these mini-narratives as C-Prints. It's a process that greatly increases the scale of the otherwise throwaway snapshots, while magnifying the imperfections in the expired film stock. (James Scarborough, Frieze Magazine)