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Working across art and fashion since the 1990s, Italian photographer Brigitte Niedermair creates images that fuse conceptual enquiry with refined formalism to feel engaged with tradition and ‘suspended in time’. Deeply responsive to the history of representation and to classical modes of painting, her work evolves with a slow, critical methodology and from a process, she terms, of ‘doing, waiting and seeing’.
Born in Merano, South Tyrol in 1971, Niedermair lives and works between Merano, Milan and Paris. The singular quality of light, agricultural traditions and mountain landscape of the artist’s home alpine region have profoundly influenced her art, shaping both technique and subject matter and making her care, she has noted, ‘for precise images’. An autodidact by nature, Niedermair set out to be a painter but, after learning the mechanisms of photography through hands-on work, became one of the first female fashion photographers in Italy. Carving a path with creative flair and resilience through a world defined and structured by the male gaze, she is now among the most successful photographers of her generation, recognised, in particular, for her ongoing collaboration with Dior.
Characterised by her incisive precision, Niedermair photographs in series, principally shooting with a tall, rectangular, 4 x 5inch camera – a cumbersome tool that requires a fixed focal point but which can register high volumes of information. ‘I never start with the idea of an image’ she has remarked, ‘but rather with a concept or a thought; the image comes later’. ‘I like to reach the most precise and profound point of my thought process, and to do so, I must be rigorous, essential, and strict – especially with myself.’
Concepts of identity, the representation of the female body and the agency of the viewer – subjects the artist has long explored and reinterpreted in her fashion photography – come to the fore across all of her practice, none more so than in the series ‘Madame Hirsch’ (2009), first presented at Museion, Bolzano in 2009. Rooted in the mechanisms of looking, as much as in the structures of painting, in these works, Niedermair documents the life and rituals of the late Austrian socialite Renate Hirsch Giacomuzzi – an itinerant, glamorous diva placed at the epicentre of each image. Echoing the theatre of historic portraiture, Niedermair’s hyperreal tableaux vivants, rich in symbolic detail, feature Hirsch at social events, posing within epic scenery, or relaxing in lavishly decorated homes – all perfectly authentic, ‘natural’ film sets, redolent with a staged grandeur and isolated, hermetic surreality.
Time and the subliminal study of presence and absence are consistent themes in the artist’s works, discernible in particular in ‘Eccehomo’ (2018). A project created for Castel Tirolo, Italy, in these photographs Niedermair explores embodiment through fragmented images of the ancient mummy of the Val Senales Glacier. Referencing medieval religious iconography, here the body is fractioned and framed for our meditation, recast as an archive of time and site of memory. Similar themes underpin ‘Are you Still there’ (2011-14), a series focusing on the Egyptian pyramids. Rather than a mere document of epic funerary architecture, Niedermair pays attention to the ineffable in her images, making the subject of her lens existence, the afterlife and the transition between material and spiritual realms.
Several other bodies of work explore iconic subjects from art history. In ‘Transition – Giorgio Morandi’, (2012-13), Niedermair looks beyond the work’s ostensible subject matter to reflect on the significance of the horizon line in the great Italian painter’s works. Shown alongside Morandi’s canvases at the Morandi House Museum in Bologna, they parallel an effect of spiritual enclosure, serially re-enacting his compositional seclusion to propose a re-engagement with the rigour of his painting. ‘I wasn’t approaching Morandi, but rather ‘being’ Morandi’, the artist has reflected. Equally intuitive in method, in ‘Sol LeWitt, under the lenses’ (2018), a series documenting the conceptual artist’s ‘structures’, Niedermair chooses to blur their famous architectural lines in favour of the negative space between. Produced with her own quantifiable mathematical system, her camera zooms in, around and above LeWitt’s iconic works to chart a metaphysical journey through space and a musing on light, tonal shift and shadow.