Provokr

BY: RAMONA DUOBA

Angela Strassheim once said, “I don't take pictures. I make photographs. Much like a painter constructs a painting, everything in a photograph is there because I decided it would be there.”

In New York City, Dru Arstark Fine Art recently launched an online exhibition of color photographs by Angela Strassheim. Brief Encounters is an exhibit based on the artist’s childhood memories and experiences growing up in a Midwest fundamentalist Christian family.

Her meticulous attention to detail undoubtedly stems from her work as a forensic photographer. Before receiving her MFA from Yale, Strassheim produced crime scene evidence and surveillance photography while living in Miami. Later, after moving to New York, she began to photograph autopsies. This forensic experience has had an undeniable impact on her visual approach and serves as a simple guideline. “I learned to pay attention to detail through that job, like how you have to consider the entire frame, how something that’s way off in the back corner–it’s still part of the image. If this goes to court you can’t have a person back there, you can’t have a bloody knife in the background. So I think it was just learning to pay attention to the entire frame and the composition that you’re looking at,” said Strassheim in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.

When Strassheim was nine years old, while walking by an excavation site in her suburban subdivision, she spotted a little boy’s dead body. She ran to the nearest house for help, and when the paramedics came, she stayed to watch. Arstark says, “This compulsion to look is the driving force behind all of her work and her background in forensic photography informs her artistic style in which every day mundane moments that shape our lives are treated with the compositional rigor and attention to detail as that of a crime scene. By recreating events inspired by her own life experiences, it allows Strassheim to see herself through other people. She says: “I ask myself, “What did that event look like to someone else?” Or “How was the other person affected who witnessed the event.?”

Although the majority of Strassheim’s photographs depict interior scenes, Arstark says, “a key subset of works focuses on adolescent girls in the landscape, alluding to the physical and psychological territories they must traverse. A runner all of her life, Stassheim would run for hours, alone, on gravel roads. Coupled with an interest in stop motion photography, in Untitled (Running Girl), Strassheim captures the young teenager’s motion with the focal accuracy of her still subjects. Just as the photograph freezes the girl’s motion, it also isolates a quick moment in the narrative when the runner becomes aware of the car behind her. The runner’s sideways glance, defiant and tense, suggests her mounting anxiety. For Strassheim: “This image is about my fear of that car, that somebody. In this moment of exertion and peace, the adrenaline kicks in, and she feels power over the fear until the car passes and keeps going.” 

Strassheim’s work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Yale University Art Gallery, and private collections, including Sir Elton John and Peter Norton.

The online exhibition, Brief Encounters, runs through January 16, 2021.

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Dru Arstark Fine Art makes rare prints available on Artsy.com

Statement

Based on childhood memories and experiences growing up in the Midwest, Angela Strassheim’s meticulously constructed, staged photographs depicting the transition from childhood to adolescence, from young adulthood into family life, vacillate between disturbing and sweet.

Brief Encounters: Photographs by Angela Strassheim

November 16, 2020 - January 16, 2021

“I don't take pictures. I make photographs. Much like a painter constructs a painting, everything in a photograph is there because I decided it would be there.” -Angela Strassheim

Dru Arstark Fine Art is pleased to present Brief Encounters a special online exhibition of color photographs by American photographer Angela Strassheim. Based on childhood memories and experiences growing up female in a fundamentalist Christian family in the Midwest, her carefully constructed, staged portraits and domestic scenes depicting mundane daily rituals are an intriguing blend of the perfectly ordinary and highly theatrical. Her style is noted for its formal perfection – clean, luminous color, meticulous detail and relentless symmetry.

Pivotal to understanding Strassheim’s photographs is knowing that prior to receiving her MFA from Yale in 2003, she worked as a forensic photographer, where she was trained in documenting crime scenes with emotional detachment and exacting precision. Unlike the more conceptual approach prevalent in art programs, the forensic training was grounded in empirical, scientific methodology. Setting up the frame is the most essential element of the forensic photographer’s work: while capturing all of the essential details pertinent to the crime, the photographer also strove to eliminate every extraneous element from the photographic record. The second most vital task is to make certain that every detail in the image appears in focus. Having had an undeniable impact on her visual approach, Strassheim distilled the elements of the forensic experience into one simple guideline that continues to inform her work to this day: if a detail is unimportant, it falls outside the frame; if it is within the frame, it is significant and, therefore, must be presented in clear, sharp focus.

To achieve the heightened degree of sharpness and clarity she requires, and to augment the depth of field in her photographs, Strassheim uses strobe lights. Coupled with her use of a large format 4 x 5 camera, the lights make it possible to have even greater control over where the focus falls and how it weaves its way through the image.

Her multi-faceted use of color – to unify, associate and disrupt elements in the image is evident in all of her work. She is attracted to the already existing pristine, saccharine pastel interiors of the upper-middle class home, and colors are often tied to objects and activities that perpetuate traditional gender roles.
Foremost, however, are the visual stories Strassheim tells. At first glance, the images seem simple, benign – almost too perfect. Yet, there is a subtle unnerving undercurrent in the open-ended narratives, which are, at once, specific to her and universal: In Untitled (Father & Son), a man stands behind his young son at the mirror combing his hair, like Pygmalion sculpting the boy into his own image. The father’s gesture is ambiguous: it could just as easily be seen as loving as controlling. In fact, the man in the photograph is Strassheim’s younger brother; the boy is his son. "Untitled (Savannah on Window)" is based on Strassheim's memories of having been put to bed early in summers and watching the other children play outside with a deep pang of missing out. The precarious pose of the little girl and crack in the window at her left are subtly unsettling elements in this depiction of a young child's desire to explore the outside world. In Untitled (Ripped Stockings), amidst a scene of bright, candy-colored colored gift-wrapping paper, a little girl notices a small tear in her stocking, a disappointing blight on an otherwise perfect day.

With her steady, unwavering gaze, Angela Strassheim transforms ordinary settings by her keen sense of observation and compositional rigor to create images that draw us into worlds that seem picture-perfect, but, as one keeps looking, are not as perfect as they appear to be.

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For a complete CV, please contact: dru@druarstark.com
Link to video about Angela Strassheim’s work: http://www.angelastrassheim.com/interview

Viewpoint: Angela Stassheim

We asked photographer Angela Strassheim to share with us this Mother's Day her thoughts on motherhood and what is has been like for her during the COVID19 crisis as a working mother. Strassheim's photo Janine Eight Months Pregnant caused quite a stir here in Jacksonville in 2014. During her Project Atrium exhibition, a Jacksonville city councilman likened the portrait to pornography trigging local and national public outrage. Strassheim offers here her thoughts on the fortifying support created by that experience and what it means to support each other in these troubled times.

Never before the actual experience of motherhood could I have imagined exactly what it would feel like and how my life would change. My children have coaxed, teased, yanked and cuddled new parts of me out of my old self. Contending with all of the new challenges that they presented became the new normal and so my work, always about the domestic sphere, took on a decidedly maternal point of view. Lucian and Katherine, the centerpiece of the MOCA Jacksonville Project Atrium exhibition was actually made long before I became a mother, but I had never really embraced it until the exhibition. It was the first time I had ever exhibited it, and the Project Atrium exhibition was a new chapter in my work.

In November 2014, amidst claims that the Janine Eight Months Pregnant photograph from the show, a reclining nude on a couch, was pornography, I was reminded that even in its totally natural state of bearing life, a woman's body is a constant battleground. When #istandwithmoca bravely responded to denounce those claims, I felt galvanized with the people of Jacksonville and proud to take that stand with them.

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ANGELA STRASSHEIM, Untitled (Lucian and Katherine), 2005. Archival pigment print, ed. 2/5, 40 x 50 inches. Museum purchase, Acquisition Fund and contributions from the Collector's Circle. © Angela Strassheim. Used by permission.

Time Magazine Cover

When photographer Angela Strassheim went recently to visit Cheryl Chutter in Stamford, Conn., she was there not on assignment, but as a friend. Chutter, 51, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 17.

Chutter was on her first day of quarantine, and Strassheim had come by to leave some food for Chutter and her son outside the door. As she approached the house, she saw Chutter in the window wearing a face mask, and was struck by how powerfully the mask seemed to visually convey the frustration, fear and isolation her friend was feeling. Strassheim asked if she could take a quick photo on her iPhone, and came back the next day with her camera. “For me it sums up where we are at right now. We are all imprisoned in our homes and the window is like a mirror to look back at ourselves,” she says. “You are that same person in your own home whether you have the mask on or not.”

Chutter thinks she was infected when she attended a birthday party in Westport, Conn., in early March. About a week after the gathering, she learned that one of the attendees, who had recently traveled abroad, had tested positive for COVID-19. By then, she had already been once to a hospital and once to an urgent care facility due a high fever, chills, body aches and utter exhaustion. But it was only after she discovered she’d been in contact with someone at the party who was diagnosed with COVID-19 that she was able to get a test, since kits were so scarce.

When she finally received her positive test result on March 17—after eight days in quarantine—she said one word: “Relief, I felt relief. I knew now that my dad can get tested. I just want to be safe. I want to take care of my son, be considerate to other people and I don’t want to leave my house till quarantine is over.” Since the party, 20 attendees have tested positive.

-Paul Moakley for Time US

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