Stefanie Schneider is a German photographer, who has developed her distinctive, saturated style of imagery through the use of expired polaroid film. The use of unstable chemicals in her photography creates unexpected and beautiful effects in her pictures – intensifying or fading colours, blurring subjects and creating ambiguity of time and space.

Included in Martine Sitbon’s A#5 are a series of Schneider’s images from the  2006 book Strangers in Paradise, which feature the quietly beautiful Australian actress Radha Mitchell in the Californian desert. Schneider’s technique is accompanied by a written and visual narrative – the written text being an explanation for her liberated approach as a storyteller. As an artist, Schneider eschews the structure and planning of a pre-determined shoot, allowing all conditions at the time to find their own balance and evolve into a unique and beautiful dialogue.

These particular images capture this spontaneity, with Radha wearing a violent orange wig and painting her nails, playing with a pistol, leaning against a car and sitting closeup. Her expressions range through confidence, inquisition, contentment, and concentration, seemingly so intimate that the series could almost be someone documenting their lover on a trip.

As Schneider says “somehow Max and Radha in their bizarre outfits out of tune with the environment ended up in their own little self-contained world full of desire, loneliness and open story endings. A projection of myself at that moment in time.”

Please take a moment to view one of Stefanie’s newer works below in the video, entitled ‘Til Death Do Us Part’.