Stefanie Schneider

Who is Stefanie Schneider?

Stefanie Schneider is a German photographer living in Berlin and Los Angeles. Schneider's photographic work exploits the distinctive appearance of expired Polaroid instant film. Her photographs are enlarged by hand in her Berlin laboratory. Random visual artifacts can be found in the resulting imagery, a consequence of deterioration of the chemicals and film involved.

Combined with her preferred choice of location, the American West, and the mounting of sequential images in a panel, the photographs evoke the impression of faded film stills. Schneider's work is released in books and exhibition catalogs. She holds a MFA in photography from the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany.

Schneider is currently working on a project called "29 Palms, CA" which is a feature film / art piece that explores and chronicles the dreams and fantasies of a group of people who live in a trailer community in the Californian desert. To date, the project includes six films: "Hitchhiker", "Rene's dream", "Sidewinder", "Till death do us part", "Heather's dream" and "The girl behind the white picket fence". A defining feature is the use of still Polaroid images in succession and voice over. Characters talk to themselves about their ambitions, memories, hopes and dreams. The latest of these short film is "Heather's dream", starring Heather Megan Christie and Udo Kier, and was selected in May 2013 by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and is also nominated for the 2013 German short film award.