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Thea Schrack
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Thea Schrack is a photographer with a penchant for the past. Her photographic forays have taken her to English country estates and Czech castles in search of places with a sense of beauty and mystery. Schrack's fascination with architecture and landscapes produces photographic work, which predominantly figures structures and gardens steeped in antiquity.
Schrack's photographs are decidedly complex images involving countless shapes and textures. There is a Gothic sensibility which permeates her work, in the solitude of the Czech castle ruins, elongated shadows, moss laden trees, arrested fountains and open gates Schrack uses the photographic medium to transform, or possibly even romanticize, small vignettes of our world. She aspires to capture the essence of the subject through the balance of the absolute and a dream of bringing it into a new existence.
Schrack is constantly captivated by the role of light within her work. She experiments with photographing the same image at different times of day. The picture at noon will be different from the picture at 8:00 AM, she sates. Schrack also favors visiting the site several times to perceive the subtle diurnal and more evident seasonal changes and to develop an increased sense of the beauty of nature within the area.
The pervasive ethereal, somnambulistic effect throughout her work is derived from an amalgamation of her subject choice, film and developing techniques. Her use of infrared film overexposes the lights and intensifies the darks, producing work which embodies her desire for a sense of mystery. Schrack works with a sepia-toned printing process which involves bleaching and toning, further accentuating the lights and darks within the photograph. The ghostly paleness created by the infrared film relates the atmosphere of a reverie.
Finding 35mm cameras severely confining in size, Schrack shoots mostly with a modern Japanese Widelux panorama camera and cites Josef Sudek, the late Czech photographer, as an inspiration particularly for his work with the panorama camera. She favors the wider format, supplemented by infrared film, for its superior ability to encompass and complement the complexity of her work.
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