Self Portraits

It was the turn of the millennium in the middle of New York. I was a stranger. I hardly knew anyone in the city of desire and had a lot of time to spare when I wasn’t working as an assistant or doing workshops. I wanted to discover not only the turbulent world outside but also the world within me, to show my many facets in an introspective and to find out what it felt like to slip into different roles and to experiment. In my apartment I set up elaborate sets. It was the age of analog photography. Without a remote control, I had to make sure I was able to easily move back and forth. After all, in staging myself, I was both director and actress in one. I wanted to consciously break away from the serious and the representative which had historically been connected to self-portraits. Seen from the perspective of today’s Instagram Age with its omnipresent selfie portrayals, my approach seems almost anachronistic and, without any post-editing, as if from another world.

Heavily made up, I played with dolls, flowers, figures, elements of feminine attire, and my body in these works. As a vamp, bride or Madonna with child, I flirted with the camera and with myself. I didn’t focus so much on the viewer’s gaze, although I usually look directly out of the pictures. It was as if the sheltered space of my studio in a foreign place had granted me a very particular anonymity, a playground for experiential and joyful experimentation. I always shot a whole role of film with thirty-six shots and had developed it the following day. The technical conditions defined a certain distance between the shot and the revelation of the results, and this determined the process just as much as the moment of uncertainty. After my one-year stay in New York, I continued the series of self-portraits in Vienna until I myself got pregnant and the motif of mother and child suddenly gained a completely new reference to reality.