Photo: Annelies Senfter in the Keesing Studio, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris
By Annelies Senfter
In the autumn of 2012, I received a stipend for a three-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. At that time, my work focused on inner pictures: Images I see behind my eyelids before I fall asleep. Pictures I have lost because of technical reasons or pictures I simply missed with my camera. Dreams, visions, afterimages…
I work between the border of photography and writing. When I fail with my camera, I try to go on and express myself with words.
My photography attempts to acknowledge and mirror my own inner, invisible world, as well as the visible world around me. I am trying to find pictures on the border between those two worlds. If I am lucky, the doors open slightly to both sides.
While collecting pictures, I simultaneously collect words and conversations. Like snapshots, but with words. Some are appended to the pictures as subtitles or written directly on the wall of the exhibition space. Sometimes the text itself is the work and there are no pictures added.
I took these five photographs in Virginia during a recent six-week-residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The blurry and misty atmosphere in these photos reminds me of the way our minds recall pictures or our hearts remember—a bit like a Mona Lisa’s smile.
Annelies Senfter received an MFA in Graphic and New Media from Mozarteum University Salzburg (2007) and studied German Language and Literature at Paris Lodron University Salzburg (2002-2004). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency Fellowship (2015), a Cité Internationale des Arts Fellowship in Paris (2012) and an Emanuel and Sophie Fohn Foundation Grant (2015), among others. Her work was selected to be included in the Land Salzburg Art Collection (2012) and the Museum Ferdinandeum Innsbruck Art Collection (2015). She currently lives in Salzburg, Austria.
Photograph of Annelies Senfter © Bernd Haslauer, 2015