Type of Photographs :
Portraits and details of Nature or objects
Useful Links :
Please visit her website that features a lot of pictures. My favourites are in the "lithuania", "farm", "poland", "en detail" and "brunnenmarkt" tabs :
Rough Information and Comments :
It took me only one single picture to fall in love with Petra Rainer's art.
In the context of the month of Photography, she has a show in Vienna till the end of November.
It seems that Petra is obsessed by time, by the "old", and by passing time. On all of her pictures, there is at least a small element reminding of the action of time on things : a crack on a rock or on a piece of wood, a torn and rusty metal part or the wrinkles on the faces, even the younger ones.
About her portraits :
When I try to find what makes her portraits so perfect and magic to me, I come across the words "trust" and "welcoming".
This little girl with closed eyes, this man lying in his bed looking at the ceiling, or this people standing or seating in the middle of the picture staring at the camera. They all seem to accept us in their intimacy or proximity. Petra Rainer went passed the moment when people have a tendency to pose, and she also took the shot before that moment when they will be bored to wait for the picture to be taken. In that narrow time period, people are "natural", just as they would appear if the picture would have been taken by a family member.
About her "details" :
At first, I discarded her "details" as secondary. There is something too clean about the way she structures her pictures fences, doors, wood sticks, roofs, china cups, or other bottles. I thought, that was her way to rest from the complexity of portraits : she can control these objects perfectly, study the composition of the picture, come back to take another shot with a better light... I first thought it was all too easy and looking too much systematic and like an "exercice de style".
Then, it occured to me that these details were actually adding depth to her succession of portraits. All these tiny details allow us to fill the gaps between these people we see, to position them in a space, in their world. In a way, people in her portrait are "eating" so much of the picture, that you can not acutally see there environment. These details allow you to do that. To an extent, they work like the "cutting shots" in the cinema after a close up shot, where you can see what the character is doing after seeing his face in detail.
Anyway, I'm glad to introduce you to Petra Rainer, and I hope you'll enjoy her art. By the way, there's been books published from some of her pictures...
Photographies above, all taken at her show in Vienna, don't give justice to her talent. Her site will give you a better idea.
