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Shades of meaning

A Swiss photographer pushes an old form with new technology
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By Kristin Barendsen
For The Prague Post
July 27th, 2005 issue

Digital manipulation adds new dimensions to Štrba's character studies.
As children, many of us suffered through interminable slide shows of family photographs. Almost an anachronism today, such shows can nevertheless be powerful and moving records. In the largest retrospective of her work outside her native Switzerland, Annelies Strba revives the family slide show and takes it to a new level, presenting vibrant portraits based on family photos that push the limits of computerized colorizing technology.

The exhibition begins with a slide show in progress that sequences through sets of three juxtaposed images to the heartbeat of pulsing music. The photographs show Strba's two young daughters sleeping, bathing and dancing wildly; gradually growing into teenagers and adults; and then mothering their own children. Some of the images (which are in both black-and-white and color) are beautifully composed, while others are authentically blurry snapshots. The children often stare unsmilingly into the camera, appearing as haunted as the nature of memory itself. These portraits have a poignancy and emotional resonance as documents of family life.

The family photographs appear alongside shots of buildings and landscapes of the corresponding era, conveying the message that people, places and things are alive and changing. The result is elemental and sentimental, like a three-line haiku, offering a new way of envisioning how we look at family.

The slide show serves as a lens through which to view Strba's later work. In the next room, some of the same black-and-white images from the show are blown up into large digital ink-jet prints on canvas. In this group of works, one of her daughters, Linda, becomes a central element, even an obsessive mirror for the artist. Strba allows certain photographic flaws to appear also in the canvases, such as overexposure, and engineers the prints to look yellowed and aged, enhancing their nostalgic quality.

Annelies Štrba

at Galerie Rudolfinum
Ends Aug. 28.
Alšovo nábř. 12,
Prague 1–Old Town.
Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Suddenly, Strba's palette explodes with intense, highly saturated colors. She swings from traditional film-and-camera photography to the other extreme, using computer technology to digitize and colorize her images with vibrant, expressive shades of Day-Glo rose, violet, green. As the show continues, Strba's sense of color and light becomes more refined, and the works are memorable and beautiful. Her primary subject remains her daughter Linda, but the photographs are no longer about family. Linda is now pixellated and blurred, fragmented through manipulation of digital output.

While the colors of the images are resonant and emotive, the figures themselves are not. The otherworldly colors call to mind the layers of technology used to build the image, distancing viewers from the subject and depersonalizing her. Meanwhile, Linda's poses become more suggestive and seductive. One wonders if Strba is using erotic intimacy to replace the intimacy that has been lost through the digitizing process, trying to recapture the power of her earlier images.

In 1997 Strba abandoned photography to focus exclusively on video. The exhibition includes several hours of video footage with the same rich color palette, showing figures and landscapes morphing in slow motion. The videos enhance one of the artist's underlying themes: the distorted perception of memory and time.

Strba's technique is original, and her images are very successful on a visual level. But if the medium is the message, the message "cool special effects" seems superficial after a while. This exhibition offers no artist's statement, with only a few titles attached to works. Even the catalog (Aya, a book Štrba published in 2002) is devoid of text. While this may be taken as a statement that the images speak for themselves, a few words might help to illuminate any deeper meaning behind the pretty pictures.

Certainly, the show is about memory and resonance. And the colors themselves will resonate in viewers' memories after they have left the show. But it's difficult to leave without a craving for more substance. A good approach is to cycle back to the beginning of the exhibition and take another look at part of the slide show, which seems more meaningful in the context of Štrba's later work.

Kristin Barendsen can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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