Annelies Strba





The kids are asleep, their beautiful land of Nod silently staged on a soft backdrop of warm quilts and fluffy pillows, presided over by an audience of dolls and the slumbering cat Sushi. Passing from photograph to photograph you can almost hear their peaceful breathing, as sleep is taken over by those deeper states of the soul that are our dreams. These are colored by distant memories of faraway towns with mysterious double names attuned to both the German and Slavic ear: Aschewiese/Szopienice, where could it be? in southern Poland, where the wavering borders have been so bandied back and forth over the centuries? No matter. We see a house, then another. The images are faded and slightly out of focus, as though they were surfacing from an almost forgotten though obscurely present past.
These are the opening images from the series "Shades of Time" by the Swiss artist Annelies Strba, a series composed of 240 black & white and color images taken over two decades. The family is one, the generations four, portrayed for the most part in the same domestic setting. We see the artist's elderly mother, her husband and their son Samuel - seen at one point taking a bath with the cat - and their daughters, the brunette Linda, who flowers into womanhood before our eyes, and the blonde Sonja who celebrates her first Communion, is bedridden with fever, falls in love, and has a child of her own.
Strba's project would appear on the surface to be little more than a family album, and yet if we compare it to the albums we've seen, perhaps even our own, the differences are significant. Most albums are, in fact, assembled with the intent of establishing a homogeneous, chronologically arranged family history, purged of all threatening, disturbing elements. The familial nucleus that emerges from its well-ordered album is an official and legitimizing history and not a subjective inquiry that might risk falling prey to ambiguous emotions. This is precisely the ground that Annelies Strba is seeking to cover in her series. Rather than cataloging her pictures in chronological order, she arranges the images in a seesaw fashion, with episodes of the more recent and distant past sliding around and through one another effortlessly. The sense of time conjoining these pictures is undulating, more related to the uncertain rhythms of memory and shifting emotional states than to a fixed succession of objective events. The very "story" of Strba's family, which alternates with the pictures of trips taken and places seen, doesn't pay its dues to the canonical milestones of a "proper" family album. Apart from photographing her loved ones at home for the most part, her project unfolds in intimate moments of openly expressed warmth and care: The two sisters groom each other's hair, at an early age and then again later on. We see the kitchen table loaded with school books, then with table settings seen before and after a meal: the order and disorder of family life in full swing.
"When I push the shutter release," the artist relates, "I close my eyes," as though photography were for her a matter of receptive empathy, of unconscious emotion rather than an exercise in optical observation. In her hands the camera is no longer an instrument for capturing the reality of a decisive moment. None of her images of family members can be considered portraits; none faithfully recount a situation or specific place. Her images would seem rather to feed off those vague, uncertain moments, to push away from visual forms of assurance, leaving behind only a mysterious echo. She uses her photography like a loving caress with which to address her family, like an instrument sensitive to the moods and emotions that are anything but fully quantifiable. That's why she keeps every shot, even the faded and fuzzy, the red-eyed. She isn't interested in things visible but in the inadvertent surfacing of the unconscious, of intimate memories and sensations, evoked by both place and episode.
The story told in "Shades of Time" isn't just a family chronicle but the artist's personal narrative of evolving relationships, memories, and reactions as they are played out in time. Most recently that has meant taking fewer pictures of her now-grown daughters to concentrate on a renewed relationship with the outside world, especially those places so rife with collective memory, like Auschwitz, Hiroshima or the Brontė sisters' home in Yorkshire, places that she still doesn't openly portray, but emotionally "experiences." Once again, she is using her camera to explore inner relationships; rather than simply exposing, she stimulates the viewer's imagination by creating fluctuating images that hum with sympathetic vibrations.
Gigliola Foschi