Claudia Schmid

In my photographs I try to deal with each frame as a very definite experience, reducing the viewer's observations to a very specific area, thus giving them just enough information to create their own narrative.

As Juan Munoz once said of his work:

'If the drawings succeed in conveying an emotion, it's because they might give the sense that something has happened or is going to happen', he said. 'Either you're too early or too late. It's always the wrong moment.'

In my photographs, I am very interested in what isn't included in the frame, letting the viewer's imagination take over from there. I find that the viewer's imagination in a integral part of my photography, otherwise it would be easy for the photographs to become abstractions.

Claudia Schmid was born in New York in 1980. She grew up there with her British mother and American father, and began studying photography at 14. At 17 she moved to London to study photography at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design followed by School of Visual Arts in New York, Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and finished her studies at London College of Printing in 2002.

Schmid's enigmatically simple photographic compositions reflect on the power of sudden, momentary absorption to arrest and change our experience of daily life; almost like sets embodying a hypnotic aesthetic akin to that which may be found in, say, a painting of a mostly empty interior by Wilhelm Hammershoi, Claudia's favourite painter... or in the subversive sense of memory and possession in a surrealist film. The stillness and simplicity of space and the contours in the photographs allow the viewer to create their own narrative. Her work can be seen as cinematic templates of shape and colour. It gently suggests and encourages the viewer to impress their own sense of feeling, memory, content and nostalgia into the setting. The compositions are strong, yet there is a fragility in the images which is very seductive.

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