Berit Schneidereit

walks, conversations

Floating, Drifting—The Ambivalence of Photography

Berit Schneidereit’s (b. Frankfurt/Main, 1988; lives and works in Düsseldorf) works blur boundaries and chart varied courses between sets of opposites: color and black-and-white, fiction and documentation, photography and painting, positive and negative. Schneidereit operates with a broad range of photographic techniques, often experimenting in the darkroom: abstract cyanotypes abruptly veer from blue into warm yellows that let the light filter back into the sheets; hybrid black-and-white exposures engender delicate grid structures that reveal glimpses of imaginary spaces.

The artists’ book walks, conversations is the fruit of a research project at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and was created in collaboration with Bas Rogiers. Building on Schneidereit’s research into the fragment as a characteristic element of photography, it extends this theme to the domain of the book. The result is a dialogue between different forms of spaces and their contents that evokes a movement of the gaze. The publication focuses primarily on the creative methodology. The analog black-and-white test strips capture the artist’s process in the darkroom and the various techniques, including the making of photograms.

With essays by Julika Bosch and Steven Humblet.