SYNOPSIS       

29 PALMS, CA is a feature film / art piece that explores and chronicles the dreams and fantasies of a group of individuals who live in a trailer community in the Californian desert.

29 Palms, CA

Gestures

Burned

The Last Picture Show

2003 - the subconscious mind, a place where memories are stored and processed

“Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life" Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

Memories of Green

from Life’s a Dream - The Personal World of Stefanie Schneider 
by Mark Gisbourne

"Projection is a form of apparition that is characteristic of our human nature, for what we imagine almost invariably transcends the reality of what we live. And, an apparition, as the word suggests, is quite literally “an appearing,” for what we appear to imagine is largely shaped by the imagination of its appearance...."

Stranger than Paradise

Till Death Do Us Part is the story of two young lovers, lonely souls escaping the abuse of reality into each other. Imagine a stranger suddenly in your path, you can just be silent with, and you feel you have known her forever. This is the experience of Crystal and Margarita, that begins when Crystal picks her up hitchhiking on a lonely dessert road. A runaway from a cruel older brother and a broken family, Margarita is searching on the edge of the shadows for a home. Crystal was also a lonely child and already dangerously close to vanishing when she finds Margarita. For her it is the begging of  life. When she finds Margarita, she finds herself, she feels for the first time and discovers that she is not invisible after all.


Till Death do Us Part

My name is Bond..Jane Bond...Created for the documentary Instant Dreams with Caitlin Fowler

Heavenly Falls

Californication

All pieces from the movie 'Stay' directed by Marc Forster with Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts. Stefanie Schneider created all art for the artists, dream sequences, end credit sequences for this movie.

“I never remember the details of a Stefanie Schneider image, just the whole. She treads a third path between reality and dream that connects the two and truly sparks my artistic, visual freedom.”  – Marc Forster

Stay

A world where time is neither linear nor predictable. An emotional landscape, an intersection of memory, atmosphere, and raw human vulnerability.

Cathy and Shannon

Stefanie Schneider's new monograph, published by Snap Collective

A Half Forgotten Dream

private history turned into an intimate mythology of elemental fantasies where reality is perceived through a veil of psychedelic memories and unconscious projections. such is a collection of passions and dreams, an uncanny diary of ephemeral narratives and mental intensities in Schneider’s painterly photographs where subjectivity of an ontological doubt uses a poetics of pastische as a vehicle for an intertextual journey towards the truth & the authenticity of primary emotions. time is immersed in a nostalgic suspense of oneiric dimension, a sort of ambiguous coma of silence and comfort, and open space embraces a psychotic landscape of solitude & accidental pleasure.a promise framed by sensual tension between fulfillment and expectation.

Sidewinder, 2005

from the 29 Palms, CA series. www.twentyninepalms.ca

Haley and the Birds

Shown at Susanane Vielmetter, LA Projects, 2004.

OILFIELDS, 2004

Oilfields connotes both the notion of the frontier and the adventurous mentality of the West, and a kind of horizontal understanding of landscape that is so quintessential about the West. While it circumscribes the West's idiosyncratic historical and physical manifestations, it also stands for a concept that is slowly fading into the past as a new era emerges.

Oilfields

Renegate (The Last Stand)

A tale told with blemished and expired Polaroid film about the hopes and dreams of a newly orphaned girl after losing her parents who lived in the Californian desert in a vintage Spartan travel trailer. -filmed with Polaroid film stock and Super-8 footage, overlaid with poetic voice-over monologue - this feature film creates a dynamic kaleidoscope of words and pictures, a dreamy tale that channels Terrence Malick, Gus Van Sant, and pages torn from a lonely girl's journal (Palms Springs life magazine / Carolyn Ryder)

The Girl behind the White Picket Fence

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

American Depression

Once upon a time in Los Angeles....

The series captures the dreamlike essence of a day spent on the sun-kissed shores of California. The images evoke a sense of nostalgia as if they were taken from a lost era of 1960s beach culture. Schneider's use of Polaroid film adds to the vintage feel of the series, with its characteristic soft focus and warm, golden tones. 
The images in the series range from intimate portraits of sunbathers to expansive landscapes of the beach and ocean. The photographs are imbued with a sense of freedom and joy as if the subjects are completely at ease and in the moment. There is a dreamlike quality to the images as if the viewer is experiencing a hazy memory of a perfect day at the beach.

Zuma Beach (Malibu)

Soraya Wright - SORAYA, THE FOREIGN PRINCESS - She is a princess from an unknown country, whose royalty has been overthrown. She is broke and has come to the motel to sell her tiara - the last valuable item she owns and the last piece connecting her to the past ...

The Princess and her Lover - part of the 29 Palms, CA project - 2007

La legerté, le glamour des Diva d’Hollywood.

Vidéoclip, reportage de mode ou flashbacks? qui sont ces jeunes gens sur la plage? 
Stefanie Schneider n’a pas pour habitude de livrer plus d’information. La pause des modèles, les prises de vue, floues, surexposées positionnent le spectateur au coté de la caméra. De cette proximité naitra une certaine curisosité sur l’avant et l’après, sur la propre experience du regardeur face aux images que l’industrie du film americain a imprimmé dans nos mémoires....

Beachshoot, 2005 starring Radha Mitchell

"Planet of the Apes" speaks to broader themes of environmental degradation, societal collapse, and the enduring quest for meaning in an ever-changing world. Through her art, Schneider challenges us to confront our own assumptions and perceptions, urging us to reconsider our place within the vast tapestry of existence.

Planet of the Apes - 1999

Auch die Fotos von Stefanie Schneider aus der Werkreihe »California Blue Screen« erinnern an Film-Stills. Grundlage der C-Prints sind Polaroidbilder, die die Fotografin in der südkalifornischen Wüste gemacht hat. Scheinbar beiläufig im Vorbeifahren fotografiert sie die Landschaft und setzt Schauspieler, Freunde oder auch ihre Schwester so in Szene, dass nicht nur dem versierten Roadmovie-Kenner Filmassoziationen in den Sinn kommen.
»Es hat etwas Klischeehaftes, wie ich den amerikanischen Traum darstelle«, erzählt die Fotokünstlerin, die gleichzeitig aber auch die banale Realität jenes Traums vom »On the road«-Sein aufzeigen möchte. 

California Bluescreen

Musica Poetica

Enchanting Images - They are enchanting images. Hovering high in the air above the entrance to the studio, they rain down their radiance. Stefanie Schneider, photographic sorceress, spins tales of another world. - Heidi Korf