How Carrie Schneider Made the World’s Largest Photograph

“He never knows whether he moves toward her, whether he is pushed, whether he invents her, or whether he dreams her,” says the narrator of Chris Marker’s movie La Jetée (1962). The voice is describing the unsure relationship that exists between the time-traveler protagonist and the unnamed lady he visits previously, incarnated by Hélène Châtelain—actress, filmmaker, translator from Russian to French, and now the lodestone of First Living Woman (2026), a photographic set up by Carrie Schneider on view within the late curator Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale exhibition In Minor Keys. If a vital shift of gender had been to be made, the narrator’s phrases may additionally seize Schneider’s angle towards the close-up of Châtelain that she pulled from Marker’s movie and rephotographed in her Hudson Valley studio, utilizing a room-sized digicam to create the most important analog chromogenic {photograph} ever made. Like Marker’s protagonist, Schneider is caught between an indelible previous and a transformative fantasy. And like Marker himself, who referred to as his movie a “cine-novel,” she works on the threshold of distinct media types, producing a decidedly photographic work with relationships to cinema, sculpture, and the web. Hers is a labor, a laboratory even, through which reminiscence and creation grow to be indistinguishable.

La Jetée is the story of a person marked by an image from his peacetime childhood, a picture of a feminine face that stays with him all through and past World War Three, right into a determined period through which Paris has been rendered uninhabitable by atomic violence. The power of this psychological image makes him, a prisoner trapped underground within the catacombs, a prized candidate for his keepers’ experiments, which propel him by means of strata of pastness and finally towards the deadly instantaneous on the commentary jetty at Orly Airport that had marked him so deeply as a toddler: the second of his personal dying. La Jetée can be, famously, a movie made nearly fully of nonetheless pictures, save for a couple of seconds shot on 16mm that seem instantly following the road quoted above, through which Châtelain is framed in close-up, her head resting on a pillow. As the sound of chirping birds swells on the soundtrack, a sequence of dissolves between stills creates a sequential propulsion that strains towards movement; then, in what looks like a miracle, Châtelain definitively breaks freed from the necrotic stillness of pictures and blinks. Vitality, presence. Time regained. No longer is it essential to think about what it should have been like for these nineteenth-century spectators who noticed movement photos for the primary time, for now this astonishment has been made our personal—improbably, disarmingly. It is as if she had been the primary lady to return alive in mild and shadow. 

First Living Woman takes this second of motion, which dazzles not regardless of however due to how small and fleeting it’s, and returns it to a photographic eternity made monumental. Schneider performed again a couple of seconds snatched from Marker’s story of looping time on her iPhone, creating paper negatives that she then uncovered frame-by-frame onto an expanse of chromogenic paper, the factory-standard dimension of Fujifilm’s jumbo roll, to create a richly layered constructive. The uncovered roll was then despatched to Vienna to be processed, since no US lab was keen to aim the tough feat of printing. In Venice’s Arsenale, the outcomes of this enterprise seem as three curving rows of serpentine ruffle that quantity to a kilometer in size when taken collectively. Châtelain’s face is there many times in serial type, as if a filmstrip had been unspooled after which coaxed into an irregular, creaseless concertina, held in place with magnets. Although Schneider makes use of a clip discovered on-line—a relic of personal, digital fandom—her use of iteration evokes the fabric substrate of photochemical movie, recalling that La Jetée’s distinctive few seconds of animation, like all filmic photos, are at their base nothing aside from a sequence of frozen frames. This relation to the shifting picture is concretized within the further iteration of First Living Woman, proven concurrently in New York at David Peter Francis Gallery, which reanimates Châtelain inside a looping Super 16mm movie.

Across the various folds of the set up in Venice, the blinking lady from peacetime stares out from an iPhone display screen held in place by palms with nails lacquered in orange—a part of the palette of vibrant colour Schneider makes use of to remodel La Jetée’s black-and-white photos and an index of her intimate encounter with the fabric. Châtelain is typically extra, typically much less seen, whether or not as a result of she is hidden inside the buckles of the paper or due to the manifold manipulations to which Schneider has subjected her picture. She is awash in paint, punctured by holes, affixed with bits of tape, lower into confetti items that resemble digital artifacts however importantly aren’t. An entire vocabulary of analog operations has been dropped at bear on these photos of a YouTube bootleg of a 16mm movie taking part in on a digital machine, placing pictures’s graphic and painterly dimensions into play alongside the ghostly haunting of the hint. If this layered density at occasions makes it tough to discern exactly how Schneider has labored her darkroom wonders, one thing of a tutor textual content will be discovered within the single frames of her Deep Like (2020–21) sequence, alternatives from that are displayed in Venice on examine tables in entrance First Living Woman, providing the customer a extra anatomized encounter with the varied components of what Schneider has referred to as her “alphabet.” 

That this alphabet is so avowedly analog endows the set up with a posture of recalcitrance vis-à-vis the homogenizing thrust of digital imaging instruments. Seen on an iPhone display screen, Châtelain is an emblem of a remediated cinema with out partitions, one which is made miniature and possessable, capable of be paused and endlessly relayed. Schneider pulls her out of this digital flood, rematerializing her picture inside a play of quantity that denies all regularity and exceeds the small body of the cellphone and laptop computer display screen. If the size of First Living Woman is commanding, it’s with none trace of the flat slickness of billboard format. The set up is an architectural mass of prepossessing tactility, graced with a sensuousness that looks like a important rejoinder to the crispness of the overlapping desktop home windows that seem in one other work of painted fingernails, Camille Henrot’s 2013 video Grosse Fatigue, which was on view in the identical venue 13 years in the past in Massimiliano Gioni’s Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace.

As Marker did earlier than her, Schneider fixates on the feminine countenance as a website of revelation and affective depth. The motif shouldn’t be new for the artist: Her earlier tasks used comparable in-camera processes to interact with the faces of Romy Schneider and Mariah Carey. But in contrast to them, Châtelain isn’t any sort of superstar. Even if she is the star of a cult basic so beloved that cinephiles the world over make pilgrimages to the Tokyo bar named for it, the replication of her picture stays removed from the brew of spectacle, expertise, and commodification that simmers within the earlier works, imparting to them the flavour of rescue missions. First Living Woman carries ahead Schneider’s curiosity in producing photographic monuments to fascinating feminine performers whereas introducing a brand new set of issues that radiate from the specificity of her supply materials. It isn’t clear in La Jetée, purposefully so, whether or not Châtelain’s character is the mom, lover, or good friend of the beleaguered protagonist. She is solely the one to whom he clings, the one who belongs to a time earlier than disaster. Presented in a Biennale exhibition that searches for prospects for relaxation and therapeutic inside modernity’s wreckage, and at a time when the conflict and environmental devastation of La Jetée really feel much less like a science-fiction plot than they do unnervingly actual, Châtelain’s picture figures as sort of talisman warding in opposition to darkness—an icon of eager for a misplaced, higher time.

In Minor Keys, the 61st International Art Exhibition on the Venice Biennale, is on view by means of November 22, 2026.