Sally Mann And Annelies Strba, Comparing Photographic Works

b. 1947, Zug, Switzerland

Annelies Strba’s work is concerned with notions of time and history; subjects which she expresses in a metaphorical and highly personal way. In the past Strba has approached a wide range of subjects; from the earthquake-stricken city of Kobe or the gloom of Auschwitz to wild flowers on the Bronte Moor. Her attention is most often turned towards her family and their home at Melide, Switzerland, a place with an unmistakable aura. Her working process is only concluded when the images are exhibited, often a number of variants of the same story emerge and connections are made visible. Making pictures is part of Annelies Strba’s everyday life; it is her way of engaging with and making sense of her world.

Annelies Strba’s solo exhibition ‘My Life Dream’ was on show at the Brontë Personage, Haworth, North Yorkshire in 2008 and will travel to Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery from 21 November – 22 January 2009 . She had a major retrospective exhibition at Prague’s Rudolfinum in 2005. Her work was included in the touring group exhibition Fairy Tale at Leeds City Art Gallery. Other group exhibitions include Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate Gallery, Liverpool; the European Museum of Photography, Paris and the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Barbican Art Gallery, London.

Available from: http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/bio/annelies_strba (Accessed 27th October 2010)

Available from: http://www.egodesign.ca/en/article_print.php?article_id=237 (Accessed 27th October 2010)

Gallery faces prosecution over picture of a girl in the bath

Complaint from passerby fires row over what can be shown in public

Since the morning in 1859 when the bachelor don who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll opened the shutter of his camera in front of six-year-old Alice Liddell, the neck of her beggar maid costume torn provocatively off the shoulder, artists with an interest in little girls have been guilty until proven innocent.

Last night a new moral uproar was brewing after a gallery owner was threatened with arrest for showing a picture of a girl in a bath taken by her artist mother after a passerby complained to the police that it was “paedophiliac and offensive”.

The picture of Sonja Strba, taken 17 years ago in her Swiss home when she was 12, has already been published in a book and shown in several major European galleries without complaint. But last night Scotland Yard said that a file was being sent to the crown prosecution service who would decide whether the Rhodes + Mann gallery in east London should be prosecuted.

They are also looking at invites the gallery sent out for a private view of her mother Annelies Strba’s show, 2,000 of which carried the offending photograph of Sonja lying red-eyed in the suds. Detectives also scrutinised two other photographs in the exhibition, one of her son Samuel in his underwear in bed and Strba’s grandson playing naked in a flower bed. Neither seemed to perturb them.

The case has unsettling echoes of the furore 18 months ago when police threatened to seize three of American photographer Tierney Gearon’s images of her children in the nude from the Saatchi Gallery in London. Then the former culture minister Chris Smith intervened to chastise officers for overstepping the mark between probity and censorship.

Like Gearon, Strba’s work revolves around her photographing her family over the decades, sometimes in the nude but more often not, and if anything her work is more highly rated. Her deceptively artless snapshots of family life and more complex video meditations on ageing have been bought by the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and also hang in Leeds City art gallery. Strba, 55, has also been part of big group shows at the Hayward, Whitechapel and Photographers’ galleries in London and is about to be the subject of a major retrospective in her native Switzerland.

In a week when Edinburgh parents were banned from photographing their children’s nativity plays unless they had the permission of all the other mothers and fathers, this latest clash between public queasiness and artistic freedom has a morbid familiarity about it.

Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/dec/18/arts.childprotection (Accessed 27th October 2010)

Bath girl blasts ‘pornography’ charge

By Danielle Demetriou, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 19.12.02

The girl at the centre of a row over an art gallery photograph showing her lying naked in a bath has broken her silence.

The image, taken by the girl’s mother, has sparked complaints from members of the public that it is pornographic, and could lead to the prosecution of the owners of the London gallery in which it has been exhibited.

But today, as the art-versus-pornography debate continues, the Swiss girl at the centre of the controversy – now a woman aged 32 – has spoken out.

For Sonja-Maria Bron, the idea that her picture is pornographic is as ludicrous as it is shocking. Her surprise at the reaction of the British public is compounded by the fact that she was 16 at the time the photograph was taken – not 12, as it has been claimed.

Speaking from Zurich, Ms Bron told the Evening Standard: “It really is crazy. People are saying it is connected to paedophilia but that’s not so. I was not a child at the time and I did not feel like one.

“I was 16, I had a boyfriend and a job in a hospital. I knew what I was doing. And it was my mother taking the photo. It is only a problem for other people if they see it in that way. If they think of paedophiles, it is their fantasies when they see the picture, but it is not a problem for me or other people.”

The image is one of her favourite pictures by her mother, internationally acclaimed photographer Annelies Strba. Ms Bron, who is also a photographer and lives in Basel with her husband and eightyearold son, said: “I can remember sitting in the bath when my mother took that photograph.

“For me, it was OK for her to take the picture and I think it’s a very good one. I think it’s a picture that shows me and my personality at that time in my life.”

Strba, 55, has also been surprised by the reaction. The artist, who is married to goldsmith Bernhard Schobinger, has taken photographs every day for the past 40 years but her most acclaimed work features her three children: Sonja-Maria, Linda and Samuel.

Hundreds of photographs chronicle her children’s lives and, later, the lives of her grandchildren, growing up at their homes in Zurich and Melide. Strba’s fans claim the photos are deceptively artless while managing to capture the essence of family life.

They have been exhibited around the world, from New York to Berlin and Prague – and this is the first time in her career they have generated such a storm.

Strba told the Standard: “My pictures are not pornographic. I am a mother and I photograph my life every day. I have shown these photographs in galleries before and you see photographs like this all the time – but I have never had these problems before.

“The only thing I can think of is that it must be because people and their reservations in Britain are different. I don’t understand what the problem is with this picture. She was not even a child when I took it.”

While Scotland Yard officers-have taken copies of this photograph and examined others, including a shot of Bron’s son playing naked, they have not yet decided if they breach the Obscene Publications Act.

Fred Mann, curator of the exhibition at the Rhodes + Mann gallery in Shoreditch, is waiting to hear whether he will be arrested.

He said: “There were reports in the local press that Sonja was 12 (in the picture) and it seems to have stuck. The police are looking into it. Understandably, Annelies is very upset and surprised about all this.

“It’s rather nerve-racking waiting to find out if I’m going to be arrested. I didn’t realise it was against the law for a mother to take a photograph of her child.”

Available from: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-2548910-bath-girl-blasts-pornography-charge.do (Accessed 27th October 2010)

My Views And Opinions

In contrast to Sally Mann’s works Annelise Strba works in a very different, disturbing way. Instead of using her children to reveal a close, meaningful bond in their family home, she has used them in my eyes to provoke a reaction from the public. Her images reveal a sense of uneasiness in the home and make you think to the point where you question her as a mother and why she has captured inappropriate images of her child in the bath what does this trying to convey?.  After looking into the public’s response to these images, they see her works as “pedophiliac and offensive”, which explains a lot about her choice of subject and style of image. The photograph does not look as though much time or effort went into capturing the image or processing it. I feel this is quite casual and could be seen as domestic photography to a certain extent. Mann’s style as seen in my previous research entries is completely the opposite, her works are pre-planned and less evocative, they perceive a sense of love in the family home and a way of preserving time through the use of photography, capturing her children’s youth and their way of life in the quiet areas of rural Virginia.

Even though Strba’s images, are extremely shocking and disturbing to look at, her daughter of whom the image is of reveals to the press that “I was 16, I had a boyfriend and a job in a hospital. I knew what I was doing. And it was my mother taking the photo. It is only a problem for other people if they see it in that way. If they think of pedophiles, it is their fantasies when they see the picture, but it is not a problem for me or other people.” Makes us think is this so wrong if her daughter was old enough to make her own decisions and she had a choice in the image being taken and displayed to the eyes of the public. I feel even though this is so, the image is still inappropriate and un-meaningful as they have no clear point as to why she is completely nude in the bath. They are not attractive to look at and they do not show a close bond in the home, the images look cold, grainy and effortless.