Betsy Schneider
Schneider received a BA in English Literature from the University of Michigan. She received a second undergraduate degree, a BFA, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this time focusing on photography. Schneider spent a year and a half assisting photographer Sally Mann in Lexington, Virginia before moving to Northern California where she received her MFA from Mills College, in Oakland. Schneider spent several years living in London, where she started a family, before moving to Norway, where her then husband was born and raised. In 2002 she joined the School of Art faculty at Arizona State University where she is currently an Associate Professor. Schneider’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of many notable public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and the Museet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark. In 2011 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
For nearly thirty years, Schneider has been on a quest to photograph the most important people in her life; her children, family, friends and mentors. Revisiting these relationships over time to capture, preserve, protect and proclaim what it is that we hold sacred. Her photographic practice could be described as ritualistic and fiercely devoted. Projects are often long-term endeavors, daily photographs accumulate over months and years, resulting in hundreds of images.
Copious
Betsy Schneider 1997-2017 (May 17- July 31, 2018)
Artist’s statement
My work has its genesis in my childhood and family roots. Both of my grandfathers were copious family documentarians. From my maternal grandfather I first learned photography and after he died I inherited an old view camera that I used for several bodies of work. My father was a more direct influence, my original photography instructor, a psychotherapist and grief expert, (with specific focus on transformation in loss) he nurtured in me an obsession with observing and marking transitions and perhaps as well strong dose of drama. The tools and the output of my work vary significantly within photography: snapshot, appropriation, scanner images, medium and large format film, black and white and color, film and video. Always the work concerns itself with photographic mediation and the way in which the photographic image creates, conveys and alters cultural values and relationships, specifically integration of ideas of family, relationships and broader socio-political implications of how we create meaning and structure through photography. The work in this show is a selection from work from the past 20 years of my career—specifically work related to my children.
To see the exhibit, click here.