Stefanie Schneider lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Stefanie’s scintillating situations take place in the American West. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines and a cast of phantasmic characters. She works with the largely uncontrollable chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock.
ⓒ Emilie Lefellic
I love Polaroid photography. Besides the convenience it provides, instant analogue photography is fun! In just a matter of seconds, images start to magically appear before your very eyes – now that’s instant gratification!
But perhaps the strongest appeal of all is the dreamy, retro, nostalgic feel of Polaroid photographs, their mysterious emotional weight, their inherent unpredictability, the distinctive mood generated by their intrinsic colour shifts, vignetting and artifacts.
With these evocative qualities in mind, I was delighted recently to stumble across the work of Emilie Lefellic, an English language teacher born and based in France, thanks to Diana Eftaiha’s fab blog, thedphoto.com.
Of her work, Emilie says:
Basically, I think anything can become fascinating when captured on Polaroid film because Polaroid film takes every subject into another dimension: that of nostalgia, of dreams, of memory – maybe of the unconscious. What you shoot on Polaroid film just doesn’t look ordinary or ‘real’ anymore, and that’s what fascinates me.
Here are some more of Emilie’s gorgeous images for your viewing pleasure…
If you love cameras (and don’t we all?), check out Antonio Vicentini’s short and funky animation, “The Camera Collection“, a vignette of Antonio’s personal history with cameras.
This minute-long pixilated animation commences with a box camera similar to the 1930 Brownie, touches on some fun retro models like the Lomography camera from the 1980s, includes the good ol’ disposable of course, and ends with a contemporary DSLR.
Experimenting with expired film is fun! You just never know what exciting results you’ll achieve… and you might even discover your very own unique style in photography!
If you’re new to shooting with expired film, here are some helpful tips from the wonderful Lomography site to get you started…
I love lomography, and my little blue, all-plastic, medium format Diana camera, because
the philosophy here is all about having fun, discarding inhibitions, breaking with conventions and, of course, making great pictures.
Lomography can be a revelation and reshape your ideas about photography. No rule-of-thirds or looking-through-the-viewfinder restrictions here!
The lomography mantra is simple… don’t think – just shoot! Shoot whatever catches your eye, engages you, astounds you, excites you.
susie loves photography 