EVA STENRAM

Drape X

source: highlike

Work: In the Drape series, Eva Stenram plays with found images, pinups from the 1960s. The title refers to the curtains that are a pervasive element of studio pornography. This is digital montage with a particular set of rules. Although Photoshop allows images to be combined in infinite ways, Stenram works only with what is already inside the original frame of the photograph. She copies and pastes sections of the image, extending the curtains to cover most of the figure. The bold pleats of fabric look familiar, strangely right at the same time as they create a jarring effect. Images with a very familiar set of studio conventions become mysterious, both witty and slightly menacing. As background usurps foreground the remaining bits of exposed flesh take on heightened importance. Some aspects of pose, like a pointed toe or a leg cocked out towards the lower right hand corner, underline pinup clichés. In the absence of faces, breasts or genitals, hand gestures take on added poignancy. We are redirected from the central figures to the superficial details of their surroundings, a fetishist’s delight of tactile surfaces from sheepskin to vinyl to velvet. The shallow spaces teeter between seeming like actual domestic environments and photographer’s studios. Some of the curtains hang in front of actual windows, while others appear to cover blank studio walls. While Stenram interrupts the conventional staging of male desire, she embraces visual, and specifically photographic, pleasure. For the series she worked with pages from U.S. men’s magazine Cavalcade, and also with anonymous black and white negatives from the same era. The images are classically composed and exposed, with formal satisfactions that carry over into Stenram’s revised versions of them. The colour magazine images retain the specific gritty coloration of their period printing process. In exhibition, the pictures are printed and framed to echo the scale and presence of 1960s art photography. There is another level of visual pleasure to be found in tracing the artist’s intervention, especially noting the decisions she has made in finishing the jagged edges of the drapes. The digital manipulation is not meant to be illusionistic. The drapes have a stiff frontality that does not wrap around the figures so they take on a fascination of their own. Stenram’s gesture is almost puritanical; it imposes modesty on the female figures, shields them from a predatory gaze. Yet in obscuring the central action of the pictures, the artist draws us into a guessing game. Photography is so good at showing things that it is easy to forget how well it can activate the imagination. Hiding the main attractions of pornographic images, Stenram invites us to seek them in our minds. What were the models’ expressions? Their hair and makeup? Their physiques? Stenram has a history of working with loaded source imagery, ranging from family photographs to famous hoax pictures to NASA images of Mars. In each case her extensions and erasures reveal unexpected aspects of the originals and open up new spaces for exploring the imaginary. Source: Lucy Soutter, Aperture Magazine, Issue 212, Fall 2013 …….. Eva Stenram: Discomforting Domesticity Once something of a backwater populated by hoaxers, practical jokers and a few Dadaists, the borderlands between photography and collage are becoming ever more densely populated. One artist who resides here is Eva Stenram, who works with photographs that are appropriated and digitally reworked to resemble neutral, even domestic spaces, but which on closer inspection reveal sinister undertones incompatible with these original assumptions. For example an early series, Landscape with Cameras, consists of forested scenes into which security cameras have been digitally added. Aside from their unlikely location, these cameras are often positioned at improbable angles, facing into hedges, or so close to the ground as to be entirely useless for their intended surveillance purpose. Another body of work pornography/forest_pic, sees Stenram trawling the internet for pornographic images, set again in forests, before digitally manipulating the adult actors out of them. The result is a series of odd unpeopled scenes, loaded with with the sense that something has just happened, or is just about to. Stenram herself likens these images to forensic photography, and there is something of a crime scene about many of them, littered with discarded clothing, blankets (even a gun) and in many cases with the exact spot where the ‘crime’ took place marked by squashed down foliage. A third piece that extends Stenram’s fascination with domestic spaces into new territory is her on-going video piece Break-In, which mixes video from two classics of sixties American cinema, Hitchcock’s The Birds and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Stenram’s description of the work identifies the shared setting of a fortified domestic space as a point of interest, but both films can also be read in a multitude of other ways that have relevance to her practice. For example the themes of loneliness and conflicting female roles in The Birds, and the subtext of domestic discord and the threat of incomprehensible external forces in Night of the Living Dead. However Stenram’s best known body of work is arguably Drape, currently on show at Open Eye gallery in Liverpool and for which she has just been awarded the inaugural Cord Prize. For Drape Stenram takes as her starting point a series of vintage pinup photographs from the 1960’s, photographs showing women literally draped in various poses across furniture in the mundane domestic spaces of sixties suburbia. She then digitally reworks these analogue images, bringing drapes and curtains out of the background and into the foreground, in the process obscuring the models that originally formed the centre of attention, and leaving little of them on view but dispossessed limbs. As a viewer these images pull you in a multitude of directions simultaneously. The curtains emphasise the performance and titillation of the photographed scene, that these objectified women are here performing for the camera and their distant viewer. However at the same time they deny the viewer the opportunity to actually see the model and the performance. This sense of denial both makes one acutely aware of the awkward voyeuristic nature of these pinup photographs, and ironically heightens it, the absence of seeing only increasing the desire to see, the few traces of these women that are visible amplifying the need for more. Equally perplexing is the realisation that because of the positioning of many of these women in front of curtained windows, Stenram’s extension of these drapes might mask her subjects from our view, but also presumably exposes them to view from some imaginary outside. What had been a private erotic event becomes a public one by the simple repositioning of the curtain. And still the relationship between viewer and viewed is unclear, whether they are hiding from us, teasing us (as some like Drape IV suggest) or are even altogether unaware of our presence. Several critics including Marco Bohr have made connections between Stenram’s work and cultural and psychoanalytical theories of fetishism. In his essay Photography and Fetish, the film theorist Christian Metz notes the fetishistic quality of photographs, objects which are largely formed and consumed in private, as keepsakes, mementos, trophies. According to Freudian theories this private, domestic world is, as Metz notes, the birthplace of the fetish, the almost inexplicable sexual attachments to objects and situations that have no obvious erotic value. With their domestic settings and sets of disconnected arms and legs, fetishism is an inescapable theme in Drape. Stenram’s manipulations remove anything that might distinguish these women as different from one another, Indeed even the question of the subject’s gender is at times in uncertain. Features which might identify them as individuals in even in a very superficial sense are covered and erased, the remaining limbs heightening the depersonalising quality of pornography. Photographically Stenram’s collages are also strange, contradictory images because the transplantation of the background into the foreground confuses the eye. What was distant is now close, what was close is now rendered invisible, the normal rules of depth of field and perspective are suspended. Stenram works roughly, making no great effort to create seamless manipulations. In Drape IX for example the size of the curtain bears no relation to the apparently much taller women obscured by it, in Drape VII the bottom of the curtain is noticeably crudely cut. These obvious imperfections in the images pose questions about the constructed nature of erotic photography (indeed all photography) and the unrealistic and distortive sexual expectations that such images are able to transmit. In some respects, not least in terms of source material, Drape tempts comparisons to the work of John Stezaker, the English collagist who has worked extensively with reclaimed and appropriated photographs, predominantly of movie stars, a profession not entirely unrelated to that of the pornographic actor. Like Stenram, Stezaker dismembers and reassembles these photographs to create new images which at first glance often appear untroubling, but become more disturbing the longer one looks. Similarly Stezaker plays with our sense of photographic perspective, telescoping near and far, as a close up portrait gives way to a distant landscape and vice versa. However unlike Stezaker, who seemingly lifts a veil on the subjects of his source material, tempting strange comparisons and creating visual metaphors that seem to delve below the airbrushed surfaces of his otherwise inscrutable subjects, Stenram does the reverse, very literally lowering a veil over her appropriated subjects. It is tempting to suggest this masking gives Stenram’s work a subtly feminist quality, as if she is acting to protect these objectified women from our leering gaze. Perhaps these images are a form of retrospective photographic intervention, righting an old wrong. Indeed one can almost imagine Stenram ritualistically burning the originals after creating her manipulations. This convolution of the erotic and domestic, the exploitative and the protective, also brings to mind the work of Linder Sterling, who’s photo collages often combine material from women’s fashion magazines with pornographic photographs, again highlighting the competing and contradictory expectations placed on women by contemporary culture. And yet compelling as Drape is as a comment on these themes of domesticity and gender, I keep finding myself returning to the issues that it raises of the distinction between public and private. The thought that remains most compelling to me is that as these women are hidden from us by these drapes they must be revealed to someone else, on the other side, the idea that perhaps in certain forms of concealing there is also a revealing that takes place. We have never been less certain of the boundaries between the private and the public than we are right now. A.C. Grayling has written that in our rush to embrace technology we have forgone our privacy, that ‘we have stripped ourselves naked to any eyes that wish to see’. Almost everyone unthinkingly advertises themselves online, sharing vast amounts of personal information, which is readily scooped up by companies and governments to profile and assess us, as potential customers or possible threats. We are reduced in the process to two dimensional abstractions of ourselves, purposed to satisfy the fetishes of commercial marketing or governmental paranoia. Intentionally or not, Stenram has tapped into something of the nature of our age with her collages, an age where privacy is uncertain, territories are porous, and we are all to some extent on display. Source: Lewis Bush, Of The Afternoon, Issue 3, 2013.
Eva Stenram’s series ‘Drape’ uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. These photographs (mainly from the 1950s and 60s) depict women that are posed in interior (semi-) domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes. After scanning the source images, Stenram digitally extended the curtains or drapes in order to partially obscure the women. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter. The background, meanwhile, envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background. The gaze of the viewer is deflected and redirected, putting an overlooked part of the image in the spotlight. (text by Eva Stenram). Drape X 2012 50 x 50cm Fibre Based Lambda Print.
Photographer: Eva Stenram
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source: multimodepaolamartinelliblogspot

Eva Stenram, artista svedese trapiantata a Londra, manipola vecchi ritagli di giornali per soli uomini che ritraggono pin-up in posa in ambienti domestici e li trasforma in scene teatrali, tra striptease, gioco dei ruoli e gambe posticce. Le immagini suscitano così la curiosità a voler vedere oltre la cortina. La parte diventa più importante del tutto, il dettaglio suggerisce l’intero attraverso l’immaginazione. Si tratta d’immagini che feticisti di piedi e gambe apprezzeranno…
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source: theravestijngallery

Eva Stenram was born in Stockholm and currently lives in London where she received an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art. She uses image manipulation to explore photography as a medium of flux, inconstancy and transformation. In addition to creating her own photographs, Stenram often utilises found imagery in order to unsettle the original functions of familiar photographic genres. Her subjects have included pornography, CCTV, travel photography, NASA images and the family album. Photography’s imaginary and fictional status is emphasised.

Stenram’s most current series, Drape, uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. The women in these photographs are posed in interior domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes, offering a glimpse into intimate space. In Stenram’s versions of these images, the curtains are extended to partially obscure the women. The background envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter, reinforcing its role as a barrier between public and private. The resulting image makes no attempt to look ‘real’; rather, it submits to a cut-and-paste collage aesthetic whose ultimate referent is the act of photography itself.
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source: apertureorg
In Eva Stenram’s Drape series, arms and legs peek playfully, provocatively from behind billowing curtains whose vintage aesthetic and color schemes are reminiscent of mid-century elegance. Using found photographs from the 1950s and ’60s, Stenram complicates the domestic pinup portrait by turning backdrop into barrier; challenges the notions of the erotic and fetishistic; and blurs the line between public and private space.

Look out for Aperture magazine’s Fall 2013 issue, which will feature a portfolio of Stenram’s Drape photographs with an introduction by Lucy Soutter.

—Paula Kupfer

Eva Stenram’s work has been exhibited at the V&A Museum, London; Seoul Museum of Art; Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum; and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Zendai, China. She was nominated for the Les Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award in 2012 and selected as a finalist in the Hyeres International Photography Competition in 2013. She lives and works in London.
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source: artnau

Eva Stenram, une photographe née en 1976 à Stockholm, qui vit et travaille aujourd’hui à Londres. Eva Stenram a étudié à la Slade School of Fine Art et au Royal College of Art à Londres. Très vite elle s’intéresse à la manipulation de l’image, qui selon elle permet d’explorer la photographie en tant que réceptacle de fluctuations, d’instabilité et de mutations.
La photographe a donc pour but de détourner les codes des genres photographiques usuels. Et c’est ce qu’elle fait à merveille dans sa série de photo exposée à Arles cette année, intitulé Drape.
Pour cette exposition, Eva Stenram s’attaque à la pornographie en réutilisant d’anciennes photo de pin-up sur lesquelles elle déploie des rideaux au point de voiler en partie ces femmes, afin d’attirer notre regard sur l’arrière plan, de troubler la curiosité et le désir inhérents à l’acte de regarder.
Nous retrouvons dans cette série une superbe utilisation de l’esthétique du collage, remettant en cause la représentation classique de la réalité.
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source: yorokobues

Acostumbrados al puritanismo de la América de los años 50, cuesta hacerse a la idea de que se jugase con fotos de desnudos domésticos. La sagrada institución familiar, lo que ocurre dentro del ámbito doméstico, se ve amenazado por el exhibicionismo de quien nunca perdió el sentido lúdico y sugerente de la fotografía, por muy represivo que fuese el escenario. Por eso resulta muy inusual que medio siglo después el esfuerzo creativo vaya encaminado a cubrir más que mostrar lo que se censuró en aquella época.

Todo tiene una explicación y Drape, el proyecto fotográfico de Eva Stenram, también. La fotógrafa sueca ha echado las cortinas en una serie de fotografías vintage que ha relaizado con películas originales de la época. “Compré negativos originales de los 50 y los 60. En ellos aparecían mujeres posando en interiores de casas, delante de cortinas, ofreciendo una mirada del espacio íntimo”, explica. “Las he manipulado para ocultarlas parcialmente”.

Con la ayuda de Photoshop, Stenram quiere reforzar el rol de la cortina como barrera entre lo público y lo privado. Las cortinas se encontraban originalmente tras las modelos, pero a la sueca se le ocurrió que en lugar de descubrir tenía que ocultar. “La relación entre lo privado y lo público es particularmente interesante en la fotografía erótica. Quería jugar con esto”, señala.