- Portrait of a Swiss artist in residency in Toronto
In January 2008, the Alliance Française Gallery in Toronto presented several pictures from the High Altitudes exhibition of Swiss photographer Anna Katharina Scheidegger.
When Alliance Française recently decided to create a residency program for photographers, director Jean-Claude Duthion, did not hesitate and invited Anna Katharina Scheidegger as the first artist to work on a project about Toronto.
During one month Anna Katharina spent her days and her nights walking through the city’s downtown streets: locating buildings and places of interest during the day, coming back at night, with her 12 kg-heavy camera on the shoulder, to immortalize the game that light and night play together around the buildings’ architecture.
Anna Katharina’s project is all about the view on Toronto buildings, mainly shot from parking roofs. The artificial lighting and the sharpness of the pictures presents the buildings in the appearance of a toy. The details in the photographs like the wall papers of each apartment brings us from the anonymous urban walls of concrete, glass and metal, to the warm nest of each single individual citizen.
The artist works with a 4×5 inch analogue camera. The choice for this encumbering equipment is due to the quality of the lenses, the size of the negative and the technical possibilities such as the correction of the perspectives with the back of the camera. Most of Anna Katharina’s works are presented as large C-prints (150x120cm), developed by herself in the darkroom.
Anna-Katharina Scheidegger was born 1976 in Sumiswald, Switzerland.
After her studies in video art at the ENSAD, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, she followed the Masterclass at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des Arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France from 2003 to 2005.
In 2008, Anna Katharina Scheidegger received the grant of photography (Werkbeitrag) of the Canton of Berne. Her photographs are part of the collection of the Fonds national d’Art Contemporain in France and the ING Real Estate Photography Collection.
The photographic work of Anna Katharina Scheidegger was shown on places like the exhibition of the discovery price of the Rencontres d’Arles, the Kunsthalle of Bern, the museum of photography in Rotterdam, the Photo Phnom Penh in Kambodgia (curator Christian Caujolle). Her films and videos where screened at the European Media Festival of Osnabrück, in the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, in the exhibition of the Photo days in Damascus and other places.
The pictures taken by Anna Katharina Scheidegger during her residency stay in Toronto in September 2008 will be shown in a solo exhibition in the spring of 2009, during the Toronto Photography Festival.
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