Honorable Mention
Red Beauty
DESCRIPTION
face: achmea fasciatadress: guzmania
shoe: anigozantho
This picture is part of my series „Unattainable Beauty" which deals with the artificial creation of beauty and highlights the absurdity and superficiality of the beauty and fashion industry's standards. An unrealistic ideal of physical beauty combined with the latest fashion standards continues - despite movements to the contrary in recent years - to be often portrayed in popular media and creates pressure on individuals to conform to a certain body type or fashion standards.
In order to address these absurd ideals of beauty, which one can hardly escape contemplating in daily life, I created unnatural beings from flowers - the symbol of beauty and youth par excellence - that pose in front of the camera like fashion models.
Although it is supposed to look like a fashion shot, the "model" here is a still life, that is hand assembled from various cut flowers and potted plants and is photographed in the studio.
I show making-of videos on my Instagram account and website, as viewers often mistakenly categorise my photographs as AI-generated images or Photoshop compositions.
The magazine-like description above shows the Latin names of the flowers and plants used.
AUTHOR
Natalie Strohmaier is a German Fine Art Photography Artist who carefully plans her image settings and brings them to life through a lot of manual work and patience. What unites all her images is a love of staging and a carefully thought-out visual language that plays with the viewer's experiences and associations by showing familiar things in a new way.After first experiments with analog photography during her architecture studies, she did not engage with photography for nearly 20 years and instead focused on „designing images“ in front of the camera as a movie set designer. However, the fascination for photography returned with the newfound freedoms of digital photography and tablet-based image editing. Her image compositions developed more and more detailed and planned. She creates photography series on a wide variety of topics from everyday culture that captivate her. "My images are not Photoshop compositions, but real setups that are photographed, then retouched and finely post-processed in terms of light and color."
She does not commit to a particular visual language, but varies it depending on the subject. Each piece of work involves extensive research, planning, and staging and it often takes several weeks to finalize an image.
Her works play with symbolism and subtle humor. They invite viewers to contribute their own ideas to the interpretation, offering a space for multifaceted contemplation.
