Lina Scheynius
Christophe Guye Galerie is pleased to announce Lina Scheynius' upcoming solo exhibition 'Exhibition 03' at Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film from December 13 to January 31. This will be Scheynius’ first solo exhibition in Japan and it will include about 16 works.
Born in Vänersborg in southeast Sweden in 1981 and currently based in London, Lina Scheynius became a photographer after a career in modeling. After working as a model, a photographic subject and target of idealistic and conceptual projection as well as alteration, Scheynius began shooting photographs out of a desire to reconstruct the relationship between “the looker” and “the looked” and a continued interest in photographic expression, which candidly mediates that relation.
I picked up a lot from growing up in an environment where I had access to cameras and photographic books. My dad took loads of pictures of us, and watching the family slides with the projector was always amazingly fun for me. And after that I started modeling and saw how most professional fashion photographers work - and I learnt how I don't want to work.
- Lina Scheynius, excerpted from http://www.linascheynius.com/faq.html
Scheynius primarily observes and shoots herself, her friends, and lovers, and her intimate moments with them. Her interest and compassion for her life and the people in it has been a consistent theme since she shot her first photographs with the camera her father gave her when she was 10 years old. She takes her camera everywhere, including her bed and bathroom to create fresh, diaristic photographs, which frankly capture both dark and radiant moments in her personal, everyday life. The resulting images belong within the lineage of autobiographical photographic practice. Her photographs at times expose her life nakedly, but her sincere perspective gives even her sexual images a sense of refinement. Her intimate relationship with her subjects allows her to capture their bodies and expressions in a uniquely beautiful light.
The fact is that I love taking photographs and I love telling stories that can be interpreted in millions of ways through the help of photographs. And as long as I love that I will just keep doing it and enjoying it. It is really as simple as that.
- Lina Scheynius, excerpted from interview by Arata Sasaki on HITSPAPER http://antenna7.com/root/interview-lina-scheynius.html
As with Nobuyoshi Araki, whom she admires, Scheynius lives her life by engaging and shooting those around her. She began shooting photographs when she was only 10. Self-taught, she gained recognition for her work on Flickr and shot her first professional work, a portrait of Charlotte Rampling, for Dazed & Confused. Since then, she has contributed to many fashion magazines including Vogue and AnOther. As successor to the German photographer Jürgen Teller, she published a serialized photographic “column” in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit for one year. After showing works in American and European museums and festivals, such as the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam and DEICHTORHALLEN (House of Photography, Hamburg), she had her first solo exhibition at the Christophe Guye Gallery in Switzerland. She has also produced seven acclaimed self-published, limited edition publications to date.
