Carrie Schneider uses analogue photographic methods to investigate media formats and the often gendered representations they produce and hold. Employing a room-size camera that she built, she exposes film sequences frame by frame from her phone onto photographic paper, and layers sources from the image-intensive present – from snapshots and surveillance footage to social media, art history and her own work archive – through multiple exposures.
First Living Woman (2026) is produced from a factory “jumbo roll” of chromogenic paper, resulting in a one-kilometre-long photographic continuum. It is devoted to an eight-second segment from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) – that film’s only moving-image moment, which inscribes an enduring memory of a woman’s face, played by Hélène Châtelain, stirring between slumber and wakefulness. Works in the series Deep Like (2020-2021) cite references that include Sigmar Polke, Imogen Cunningham, Chantal Akerman, or another charged cinematic close-up, featuring Romy Schneider, in Andrzej Żuławski’s film L’important c’est d’aimer (1975).
Starting from images of cinematic rupture, Carrie methodically creates a loophole to these instants of the past, spending weeks with these women once again, frame by frame. Through her process, cinema with a capital C meets a present with ominous overtones, absentmindedly scrolled. Against the disappearance of both the volume of the quotidian and history writ large, Schneider’s work unfolds as a monumental act of chromogenic recall.
—Sarah Lookofsky
