Alanna Styer
Alanna Styer’s photographic experiments from her time in quarantine.
Isolated and living alone, Alanna photographed objects from her home while experimenting with new developing processes. The results are a lesson in how to spend time with an image.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
AS: A little about me: I grew up in St. Louis, MO (downtown in the city, within earshot of Busch Stadium) which has left me with a lifelong love of baseball. Since moving out of Missouri at 18 I have lived in Tennessee, California, North Carolina and now Florida.
I was wrapping up my MFA at Duke University when COVID hit and sadly my thesis show was canceled. Like most everyone else, I had to shift gears to quickly figure out how to live and create during a pandemic. Currently I’m living in Florida with my sister and taking it a day at a time.
The presentation of the photographs in triptychs is really interesting. With the number of images we consume a day, the practice of spending time with an image has been lost. In your work, as the eye moves from image to image the viewer is taught how to look closer, how to really investigate the image.
AS: The idea of a teaching the viewer how to look or creating a visual rule is something I’ve always liked. It’s a bit like a logic puzzle but also becomes an access point for a range of visual literacy levels and not just those steeped in art history.
As I was experimenting with making the polaroids the triptych came about naturally as it took three tries to get the first representational image. Instead of throwing the first two away I lined them up and this mini series on investigation and revelation emerged.
Your previous work focuses primarily on landscapes and portraits often calling you to travel. There is an intimacy and softness in this newest series. The stationary photographer is evident. Did the process of making an image change for you as the focus of the lens shifted from looking outward to looking inward on your own environment?
How has your practice changed, if at all, during this pandemic?
AS: I’m going to answer these both at one because the pandemic not only changed what I photographed but how. Early on during the pandemic I gave an artist talk and some asked me if I found myself photographing more during the pandemic; referencing the emptiness and lack of people found in my photographs as the reason why now might be the best time for me to work. But that’s not at all what happened. Instead of seeing the empty streets as an opportunity I just saw them as incredibly limiting. Before I would have to wait for people to exit the scene and in that time I would contemplate angles and light and really sit in the landscape I was photographing. With no one around I felt as if I couldn’t take this same time or maybe due to the circumstances it felt awkward to linger anywhere. I was unable to work on my current Midwest project and too anxious to be out in the world so I started photographing my own environment, even myself. This was a new way of working for me and it has been the most intuitive and experimental work I’ve made yet. I've gone back to my standard mode of working (very project/subject based) more or less but I do think I've kept some of the impulsiveness. I'm excited to see how this has changed how I present work as well.
I find the Polaroid and really compelling medium. It has the tangibility of film and the immediacy of digital. What was your experience like working with this medium?
AS: These are the exact reasons I wanted to use polaroids. I was cooped up and couldn’t get my film processed and I needed to make something that I wasn’t going to have to wait weeks or months to see the results of. I knew digital wouldn’t fix this craving because it was too fast and I needed to work with my hands at least a little bit. So I turned to my Instax Mini.
I took some traditional polaroids but it felt too much like working with a digital camera, too fast and no evidence of the human hand. I then remembered a project Lisa McCarty did where she processed the developer in expired polaroids by hand to create images. I decided to take an additional step and expose them in a camera first and then hand develop the polaroids. I did some Google searching and I came up with a process putting Instax film into my Mamiya twin lens. This process also allowed me to double expose the polaroids.
What I think is so cool about this work is that it is a process created out of limitations to document such a specific moment of time. I only made these polaroids for about a month (April-May) during the time when everything had shut down. I was living alone and I could only access what was in my house or could be shipped to me.
Casserole Recipe of the Week: Potato Casserole
I am home at my parents’ house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My mom has a cupboard full of church cookbooks. Enjoy this 1997 gem from Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Davenport, Iowa (the parish my mom and her twelve brothers and sisters grew up attending). And! The Potato Casserole is a St. Louis class (who knew?!?).