Angela Strassheim

contemporary portrait photographer:

From Whitney Biennial 2006: ANGELA STRASSHEIM
Born 1969, Bloomfield, Iowa; lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and New York, New York

Before receiving her MFA from Yale in 2003, Angela Strassheim became certified as a forensic photographer. She did crime scene, evidence, and surveillance photography in Miami and, while working in New York, photographed autopsies. Her first exhibited work was a photograph of a naked woman on an unkempt bed who had committed suicide, and subsequent photographs feature a hospital X-ray room, a body in an open casket, and a bloody surgical saw. But many of Strassheim's vivid color photographs depict less dramatic, even banal, objects and figures, and she identifies her subject matter as "the Midwest and the middle-class American family with the dog, etc." Yet the lessons of forensics have lingered, and scientific detachment, meticulous symmetry, and clinical lighting pervade each of her images. The ropy blue veins in a close-up shot of an elderly woman's hands seem macabre even after we learn that they are those of the artist's grandmother.

(google images)