The pictures stretch across four generations of her family: from a time before she was born to the present moment. Annelies' mother and aunts; Annelies as a child with her sisters. Then Annelies' children's two sisters and a brother' and finally Annelies' daughter with her own son, the first grandchild.
The photograph is assumed to freeze time, to immobilise one moment from the flow of history. In Strba's work, conversely, there is an overwhelming sense of connection between the past and present. The slow duration of time and history is expressed metaphorically through the continuity of her family across generations.
Štrba's world is concentrated in the family home in Melide, a place with an unmistakable aura, set in a lush, precipitous landscape. The characters are Bernhard her husband, Samuel her son, Samuel-Maria her grandson, the cats Sushi and Ashi, various guests and boy-friends and, most photographed, her two daughters, raven-haired Linda and blonde Sonja, as beautiful as romantic heroines. The family evolves and grows unselfconsciously in front of Štrba's ubiquitous camera. Childhood illness, messy bedrooms, meals and birthday parties around the kitchen table, first boyfriends, pregnancy, a wedding, a new child: the familiar rites of life become imbued with intense significance. The photographs are disarmingly frank, but never voyeuristic: intimate snapshots which result in extraordinary, artful compositions.
Occasionally, the outside world intrudes. Štrba is drawn to places which mean something to the people she loves. Bronte country, the famous vicarage at Haworth (another setting of intense, familial creativity) and the windswept moors of Wuthering Heights, are recurring images. She is also fascinated by places which cannot escape their histories, places of catastrophe and suffering. The tottering chaos of Kobe just after the earthquake; contemporary Hiroshima bathed in an impossibly radiant light; the terrible underground architectures of Auschwitz and Birkenau; Chernobyl, snapped from the TV, a glinting monument to destruction, with two scythe-carrying figures walking past in a moment of unnerving symbolism. These landscapes, interwoven with the family pictures, set the time of individual lives against a wider human history.
Kate Bush, Senior Programmer
Shades of Time also exhibited at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin between 11 December 1998 and 30 January 1999.
Annelies Štrba's exhibition has been made possible through the support of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland. The publication ISBN: 3907044355
Shades of Time is sponsored by Tecno
This exhibition took place at 8 Great Portland Street. For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.