This Sense of Wonder
«With light as her most valuable ally, Lustenberger depicts beings and silences, atmospheres and scraps of matter – skin, fur, feathers, wood, fruit, flowers and objects on which she seems to bestow a soul, to tell mysterious, whispered stories. She is spectacularly successful at creating an enigmatic universe that incites the spirit to dream.»
Julia Hountou
These extraordinary photographs shot with an analogue camera depict simple motifs or scenes, which the artist has used chiaroscuro effects and sometimes theatrical compositional devices to stage in a highly aesthetic manner. The photographer deals with the concept of the gaze, for example, through the sparingly arranged images, which stimulate viewers to from associations. She steers her audience’s gaze in a particular direction, simultaneously charging the image with meaning, for example, when a pregnant woman looks angrily and perplexedly into a corner, thus providing an ideal object for our projections.
An Apparition of Memory
Dried flowers – left in water and thus fixed on old diapositive glasses – replace the photo emulsion. Light turns them into delicate photographs. An Apparition of Memory is a homage to the beauty of aging and the passage of time. The images reveal the astonishing details of nature’s sophisticated constructions otherwise not visible to a human eye. I merge the ephemeral nature of a light drawing with the preservation of a photograph. I do not categorize the flowers but try to go beyond it and transform every flower into something unique. It is like taking a portrait of an individual being that has a story to tell. Every title is a quote from a song or a TV show, a movie or a poem.
Or as Yuri Mitsuda writes about the work: “Due to their almost tangible finesse, I wonder if these are real flowers. Or are they rather intricate creations made of weightless particles of light?»
For the series «An Apparition of Memory» I started to collect flowers that I stumble upon along the road that leads to my studio and let them dry. Like a scientist I fix the found flowers to old diapositive glasses leaving them in salty or calcareous water to dry. Under a shroud of kalk and salt crystals the flowers literally get dried onto the slides and become the photo emulsion. They become diapositives.
A Gaze of One's Own
The work “A Gaze of One’s Own” is my expression of how conflicted the reception of the female body still is. I am grappling with all the views of the naked female body that are imposed on me. This work feels like an emancipation, revealing both lightness and subtlety, while at the same time serving as a manifestation of the violence and pain that surround the female body.
Photographing myself becomes a vital act in my artistic process, because I cannot objectify myself. The act of capturing and creating images evolves into a performative gesture, a reflection on my own way of seeing: What is seen, how, when, and why. Through art, I aim to make this introspection tangible, challenging established narratives and offering a nuanced perspective on the intersection of history, photography, and the female form.
Watching
In Watching a dark, square-shaped image gives way to a view of a woman. Her heightened alertness expressed by subtle gesture, caused by something we don’t see generating an atmosphere of suspense, creating an image of something we might have seen before. The women are caught in a moment of raised awareness. Something unfamiliar seems to be going on. The photographs depict the moment just before the women realize what is happening – the moment of highest tension. I stage situations which female viewers may recognize as if they have experienced them themselves, though in many cases their experience is limited to the virtual reality of movies and TV. We can empower women by anticipating a different outcome for the story in the image than we are used to from film and novels. The gaze in my photographs is an important tool to create a narrative and to question the viewer’s notion of looking and watching.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Brigitte studied at Zurich University and received her MA in Social and Photo History in 1996. In the following years she established herself as a fine art photographer. She moved to New York and received her MFA in Fine Art Photography and Related Media at Parsons The New School of Design in 2007. The main issues in her works lie in her interest in the study of the gaze, the interplay between absence and presence in a photographic image, and the fact that the reading of a photograph is most often triggered by a collective memory. She explores the media itself and its close connection to themes like decay, memory, death and transitoriness. She works with a 4×5 large format camera and natural daylight, with Scanners, her iPhone, projections and everything that has to do with light images.
Contact
Awards
- 2018Merck Award, Darmstadt, Germany
- 2013Landis&Gyr residency, Berlin, Germany
- Photo Award, Canton of Bern, Switzerland
- 2006Grand Prize Winner, PDNedu, New York
- 2005Prix de Photoforum, Switzerland
Exhibitions
- 2018This sense of wonder, Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Darmstadt, Germany
- 2017Still-Leben, La Filature, Mulhouse, France
- 2016This sense of wonder, Galerie Christophe Guye, Zurich, Switzerland
- 2015Camera Work, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, New York
- 2007Brigitte Lustenberger, Musée de l’Eylsée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Publications
- 2018Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Perspektiven Strategien fotografischen Handelns, Darmstadt, DTDF
- 2015Photo London, Catalog, teNeues, London
- 2014Near, Still – Fotografien von Brigitte Lustenberger, Lausanne, Bern, Till Schaap Edition
- 2006Art 37 Basel, Catalog, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz
- 2003Patricia Büttiker, Brigitte Lustenberger, Maloja, Bern, Eigenverlag
Awards
- 2018Merck Award, Darmstadt, Germany
- 2013Landis&Gyr residency, Berlin, Germany
- Photo Award, Canton of Bern, Switzerland
- 2006Grand Prize Winner, PDNedu, New York
- 2005Prix de Photoforum, Switzerland
Exhibitions
- 2018This sense of wonder, Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Darmstadt, Germany
- 2017Still-Leben, La Filature, Mulhouse, France
- 2016This sense of wonder, Galerie Christophe Guye, Zurich, Switzerland
- 2015Camera Work, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, New York
- 2007Brigitte Lustenberger, Musée de l’Eylsée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Publications
- 2018Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Perspektiven Strategien fotografischen Handelns, Darmstadt, DTDF
- 2015Photo London, Catalog, teNeues, London
- 2014Near, Still – Fotografien von Brigitte Lustenberger, Lausanne, Bern, Till Schaap Edition
- 2006Art 37 Basel, Catalog, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz
- 2003Patricia Büttiker, Brigitte Lustenberger, Maloja, Bern, Eigenverlag