Still Life Week: Brigitte Lustenberger

This week we’re that includes Still Life initiatives, and on Friday we end with a 4-part Exhibition on Still Lifes!

I first met Swiss photographer Brigitte Lustenberger over 20 years in the past once we each lived in New York City. Since then, I’ve adopted her work by way of the occasional exhibition announcement or e-mail replace. While the aesthetics shift from venture to venture, themes of life, loss of life, transience, and wonder quietly underpin her work.

After working for years within the somber tones related to classical nonetheless life portray, Lustenberger’s most up-to-date venture “An Apparition of Memory” makes a placing departure. The photographs are each starkly minimal and sumptuously lovely. While their backgrounds are a scientific white, the detailed types of her floral topics are each colourful and intricately detailed. As a lover of flowers and wonder, I’m transfixed.

Brigitte Lustenberger, born in Zurich, studied social and photographic historical past on the University of Zurich, the place she accomplished her thesis on the pictures of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro from the Spanish Civil War. In 2006, she earned her Master’s diploma in Fine Art Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School of Design in New York.

Lustenberger is an award-winning artist who displays her work each nationally and internationally. Her most notable accolades embody the Merck Prize (2018) from the Darmstädter Fototage, the Grand Prize Winner PDNedu, the Golden Light Award, the Photography Award of the Canton of Bern (2002, 2013), the Landis&Gyr Grant (2013), the Prix Photoforum (2005), in addition to the Art Grant (2018) and the Artist Book Grant (2022) from the Canton of Bern. 2025 was she awarded with the Jungck Prize for Women Artists.

Her work has been featured in quite a few group and solo exhibitions worldwide, together with solo reveals on the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Museum Franz Gertsch, and La Chambre in Strasbourg. Additional displays embody the Saatchi Gallery in London, the platform Fotomuseum Winterthur, Kunsthalle Bern, Photo London, Unseen Amsterdam, La Filature in Mulhouse, Paris Photo, and the Walter Keller and Christophe Guye Galleries. A serious on-site set up that includes 40 large-format pictures was proven on the outdated cemetery in Monthey. Her monograph «An Apparition of Memory» was shortlisted for the Most Beautiful German Books. Lustenberger has additionally taught as a visitor lecturer on the University of Basel and the Bern University of the Arts.

In my creative follow, I interact deeply with the photographic medium, notably its inherent connection to transience, reminiscence, and the fragility of life. A central side of my work is a important examination of the illustration of the feminine physique in images and the dynamics of seeing and being seen.

My work exists on the intersection of craft, artwork, and science. Using photographic processes that I usually develop myself, I fragment, deconstruct, and reassemble pictures to problem my very own gaze. Themes of impermanence and ageing are mirrored not solely within the topics I {photograph} but additionally within the materiality of the works themselves. I mix wall-based images with spatial installations and infrequently convey collectively analog and digital images, permitting historic and modern photographic methods to converge. It is inside this dialogue that my photographic follow unfolds: as a steady technique of looking, questioning, and looking out. – Brigitte Lustenberger

While your initiatives embody portraits, sculpture, and set up, each venture has some aspect(s) of nonetheless life.  What is it about nonetheless life that appeals to you?

My nonetheless lifes virtually solely depict what has already begun to vanish: withered flowers, useless bugs, animals or decaying vegetation.

While Baroque vanitas work usually juxtaposed flowers in full bloom with indicators of decay and mortality, my nonetheless lifes give attention to the quiet great thing about what stays. I’m drawn to the later phases of life, the place change, fragility and time turn into seen.

Still life has by no means been only a style for me; it’s a means of reflecting on transience and on what decay reveals about ourselves and the society we dwell in. Inspired by the custom of Baroque vanitas work, I see nonetheless life not as a set of symbolic objects however as a means of talking about ourselves. I see nonetheless life as a visible language. Every nonetheless life is in the end about folks. Flowers, fruit and on a regular basis objects turn into protagonists that invite us to think about our personal tales.

My nonetheless lifes revolve round images’s central paradox: though images was invented to protect life, each {photograph} quietly reminds us that the second has already handed. Wilted flowers, useless bugs and fragile objects turn into collaborators in exploring time, reminiscence and transformation, inviting viewers to think about their very own tales.

On a extra private stage, the method of making these nonetheless lifes affords me a uncommon sense of slowness. It invitations me to watch delicate modifications, to spend time with issues which might be normally missed, and to find magnificence in fragility. Sometimes my studio seems like a cupboard of curiosities, the place the great thing about issues which were discarded continues to unfold.

Recently, I’ve begun creating nonetheless lifes utilizing casts of my very own physique as a part of A Gaze of One’s Own. Here, nonetheless life turns into a means of reflecting on the feminine gaze and on the absence of reference pictures for a lot of feminine our bodies. The casts are now not learn as a portrait of myself, however as quiet objects that invite a special means of seeing

Your latest venture “An Apparition of Memory” options flowers seemingly in suspended animation.  Can you speak concerning the course of of creating these pictures and the way you got here to it?

An Apparition of Memory seems like a brand new language of flower images. Yet it’s not about flowers as botanical specimens, however about their quiet transience, their light disappearance, reminding us of the fleeting nature of life.

In my distinctive photographic course of, dried and wilting blossoms exchange the light-sensitive emulsion on outdated glass slides. Immersed in water, they regularly turn into the emulsion itself. As with a photographic slide, mild passes by way of it, reworking it into fragile photographic pictures that reveal traces of time and the great thing about transience.

There is one side I didn’t anticipate after I started the collection. Although now not alive, the flowers unfold a fragile dynamism, harking back to a dance in timeless weightlessness. Again and once more, they appear to interrupt free from the confines of the glass, unfolding into vivid, particular person gestures.

The images reveal particulars invisible to the bare eye—filigree constructions that testify to the extraordinary structure of nature. As the flowers lose their botanical identification, they turn into singular beings, every with its personal presence and story, , like a portrait quietly evoking the traces of a life. Their titles, borrowed from songs, movies, tv collection and poems, weave one other layer of which means into the work.

Do you will have any upcoming exhibitions or publications you wish to share?

I first found the method whereas working with useless bugs I discovered in my studio, situated in an outdated industrial warehouse. I offered them as projections utilizing classic slide projectors. Years later, I started experimenting with flowers utilizing the identical course of. Unlike the bugs, nonetheless, the blossoms had been too dense to be projected. Instead, I began to enlarge them as photographic prints.

Until August 30, I’ve a solo exhibition «A Gaze of One’s Own» at Museum Franz Gertsch in Switzerland: 

The exhibition catalogue has simply been revealed and contains texts in each German and English: 

In November, I plan to current my work at Paris Photo with Galerie Esther Woerdehoff.

«An Apparition of Memory» has been revealed as a monograph by Hatje Cantz: