Stranger Than Paradise

The first complete overview of the work by the new shooting star of the young German photography scene.

Blotchy, overexposed, and unusually colored, Stefanie Schneider’s suggestive photographs break with the conventions of the medium. The expired Polaroid film she uses distorts in a surreal way things we are familiar with from road movies: motel signs from the fifties, palm trees against a cyan-blue sky, candy-colored limousines, a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A graduate of the Folkwang School in Essen, Schneider populates these settings with young people who seem oddly lost; her colorful staging of normality seems to be subliminally threatened or threatening. Director Marc Forster had good reason to integrate Schneider’s photographs into Stay, his new thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. Stranger than Paradise, Schneider’s latest reminiscence of Hollywood, was published in conjunction with the film’s release.