Head Turner

source: clarestrandcouk

Clare Strand’s imagery are conceived, researched, developed and resolved through a highly unusual and personal sensibility, using a clear and decisive method of production unique to each project. Strand belongs to the everyday, yet her images evoke the mesmeric, the talismanic and the unsolvable. Solutions reporting the ordinary often turn up further layers of complexity and reveal problems as yet un-considered. The hinterland to her image making is provided by a childhood upbringing where a family life in a suburban cul-de-sac was confounded by true crime magazines, ominous supernatural events, Paul Daniels on Sunday evenings, and a flasher who lived in the house opposite.

Clare Strand’s work is held in the collections of Arts Council England; The National Collection; The British Council; The Folkwang Museum; The Unicredit Bank; The New York Library; The Victoria and Albert Museum and many private collections.
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source: rencontres-arles

I work, for the most part, with black and white, believing it offers a psychological level of clarity that helps to strip the visual world down to its very core. My aim is to take photography to task by highlighting its many uses and it many limitations—operating at all times in the slim corridor between the understood and the absurd. With Conjurations, Skirts, Flatland and Spaceland I use a monochromatic mode to suggest an alternative reality. I do this with varying degrees of conviction or success. Despite my best intentions and efforts, these images can prove imperfect and fallible. Enjoying these imperfections, and celebrating them, has, for me, partly solved an impossible conundrum and made (non)sense of the world for me. Ideas are central to my practice. I have never committed to just one style of working, but instead I adopt the approach that I feel is most appropriate to my self-set challenge. My collections of utilitarian images, catalogues, scrapbooks and literary texts are the primary influences on my practice. I am interested in imagery through which need and functionality are prioritised over aesthetic value; where the raw substance of the image is revealed as it becomes detached form its initial intention or use. I am always keen to try to fathom what this shape-shifting medium is perceived to be and, in turn, what it might be.
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source: rencontres-arles

Je travaille surtout en noir et blanc car il me semble que cela contribue à simplifier le monde visuel. Mon objectif est de prendre à partie la photographie en soulignant ses multiples usages et limitations : je me tiens en permanence à la limite entre l’évidence et l’absurde.
Dans les séries Conjurations, Skirts, Flatland et Spaceland, le mode monochrome me permet, avec divers degrés de conviction et de réussite, de suggérer une réalité alternative. En dépit de tous mes efforts et de ma bonne volonté, ces images peuvent s’avérer imparfaites et faillibles. Apprendre à apprécier et à célébrer ces imperfections m’a permis de répondre en partie à une énigme insoluble et de donner en quelque sorte un sens à l’absurdité du monde. Les idées sont fondamentales dans ma pratique. Je ne me suis jamais cantonnée à un style unique, préférant adopter l’approche qui me semble la plus adéquate pour répondre au défi que je me suis posés. Ma collection d’images, de catalogues, d’albums et de textes littéraires est ma principale source d’inspiration. Je m’intéresse aux images où la nécessité et la fonctionnalité l’emportent sur la valeur esthétique, celles dont la substance brute est révélée lorsqu’elle sont détournées de leur finalité initiale. Je cherche toujours à comprendre comment ce medium aux contours mouvants est perçu, et inversement, à quoi il pourrait ressembler.
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source: exitmedianet

Clare Strand. Surrey (United Kingdom), 1973. She studied at the University of Brighton and later earned a master’s degree in photography at the Royal College of Art in 1998. She mainly works with black-and-white photography. In her highly ironic, very clever and even perverse pictures, the themes are of utmost importance: forensic imagery, the mechanism of Spirit Photography, and instruction manuals are among them. She devotes a great deal of time to research in every case. Her series Photism was made with a special camera that captures the aura of the females adolescents whom she portrays. Her work has been shown in major institutions such as TATE Britain; the National Media Museum, Bradford; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; and the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, among others.