Desert Bloom
an Essay by Shannon Timms
Los Angeles, 1996 - A young German artist stumbles upon a massive trove of expired Polaroid film. The camera is loaded, the button pushed, and a unique vision is born. Stefanie Schneider discovers that the alchemy produced prints whose colors evoke sun-faded worlds and half-remembered dreams. Heading out into the California desert, she uses this medium to create an oeuvre that transports the viewer into a cinematic landscape overexposed by the intense gaze of the sun. It is a place characterized by a sense of deep yearning; each image promises escape.
A parachute from another world lands in a bleached-out, barren landscape. A rose bush flowers outside a parked trailer. A woman in a pale dress and strappy heels stands in the desert, a rotary phone in her hand. The turquoise of her belt is mirrored in the sky above. The phone’s pop of red signaling it’s from another place and time. The image dances between past and present, between black and white and color, not unlike the post-tornado moment when Dorothy opens the door and steps out into the technicolor world of Oz. Over the course of the last 19 years Schneider has created an Oz of her very own in 29 Palms. She has conjured the world, written the script, assembled the cast, dressed the part, played the role, shot the scene, developed the film.
Her photographs tell a story in which the heroine begins, like Dorothy, alone in a strange and otherworldly landscape. She then assembles a disparate cast of characters, friends and lovers whose aspirations are all tied up with her own. We meet Oxana, Renée, Cristal, Daisy, Heather, Max and others, each of whom moves in and out of Schneider’s larger narrative, bringing along their own personal story of love, loss, and longing. Overcome by the haze and the heat, their stories intermingle, rising, falling, and weaving through each hallucinatory fever dream. We see lovers rushing their way into and out of love. In the series Stage of Consciousness Radha Mitchell and German actor Udo Kier navigate an abandoned film set, together and apart, circling one another in the desert light of a fragmented dream, suggesting catharsis won through confronting life’s battles.
In your hands you hold an artifact of this decades-long project, whose length itself is testament to the transformative nature of time upon memory. The fragments of text, snippets of dialogue, and inner monologues, add to the emotional power of the images as something fleeting, dissolving into the past but leaving behind a glowing truth.
As one of her characters says, “I sit on the edge of my bed and cry quietly for what I’ve lost. What I’ve loved. But yet here I am still breathing…”
Ephemeral Reverie: Embracing Imperfection
The Blurred Figures: A Tale of Connection
A man and a woman walk hand in hand—a symbol of unity and shared experience. Their identities are veiled by the chaos of expired chemicals, their figures blurred into an ethereal semblance. This visual distortion becomes a narrative device, drawing our focus away from specifics and towards the universal essence of their bond.
Embracing Imperfection: Wabi-Sabi
Embodying the essence of Wabi-Sabi—an aesthetic that finds beauty in the transience, imperfection, and incompleteness of the world. The mottled textures, echo the inherent impermanence of all things.
A Glimpse of the Ethereal: Transcending the Ordinary
As the chaos of the chemicals envelops the figures, an otherworldly quality emerges. The Polaroid becomes a window into a world where the boundaries between reality and dreams blur—a place where fleeting moments are elevated to the realm of the sublime. This ethereal quality reflects the essence of dreams, where reality and abstraction intermingle, where everything is possible.
A Reverie of Timelessness: The Unspoken Narrative
Schneider’s artwork becomes a canvas for contemplation—an invitation to embrace the imperfections that adorn life’s tapestry. The blurred identities and the fleeting nature of the Polaroid mirror the fleeting nature of existence itself. Just as dreams elude the grasp of consciousness, the figures within the artwork invite us to reflect on the transient nature of our own stories.
Lance Waterman