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.