Stefanie Schneider - My Girl (Till Death do us Part)

My Girl (Till Death do us Part) - 2005

98x97cm,
Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs,
Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid.
Certificate and Signature label.
Artist Inventory #9193.
Not mounted.

Stefanie Schneider is a German-born artist whose work has reshaped the landscape of contemporary photography. Shooting exclusively on expired Polaroid film, she built a vast and evolving body of work that captures time not as a sequence, but as an atmosphere — fragile, burned out, and half-remembered.
Set against the faded sun of the California desert, Schneider’s images reveal moments of emotional exposure: figures adrift in motel rooms, swimming pools, in-between spaces. These are not portraits of people, but of states of being — longing, waiting, detaching, enduring. The chemical deterioration of the film becomes part of the narrative, a record of decay baked directly into the image.
Over three decades, Schneider’s work has drawn artists, actors, and musicians into her world — not as subjects, but as collaborators. She has worked with Cyndi Lauper, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ryan Gosling, Ewan McGregor, and many others who saw in her practice something more than photography — a cinematic language, emotional architecture, a world unto itself.
Her long-form series 29 Palms, CA spans books, films, and large-format prints, offering not a story, but a sustained state — a territory where fiction, memory, and lived experience coexist. Each image stands alone, but together, they form one of the most distinctive archives of analog photography in the 21st century.
Schneider’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. She continues to live and work in the California desert, where the silence, the space, and the light remain the truest collaborators in her practice.