© Sira-Zoe Schmid
The Untitled Portrait Series deals with the question of uniform in daily life and war.
© Sira-Zoe Schmid
The series consists of 120 pictures – portraits of 12 women and 12 men, each person from 5 perspectives – in which the room and the uncovered body fades away: “Undefined white space and a body in dark clothing.”
The composition and systematic, archival approach of the pictures was inspired by half-body portraits of soldiers and police photographs, or mug shots.
To create a link between uniforms in daily life and war, I was looking for references of military-uniforms in our daily life‘s clothing, which are made more visible due to the photographic technique and composition. On the other hand the body becomes a sculpture, and by erasing the face the body becomes a body without identity. Yet, this identity is not entirely lost. The clothes and the body within the pose (of a soldier) start to take the role of the storyteller and all together lead to a closer examination of the essentials of the portrait itself and an analytic juxtaposition of these human forms of representation.
Biography
Sira-Zoé Schmid is an artist, with a focus on photography, text, installation and performance. She is living and working in Vienna, Austria. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class “Fine Art and Photography” under Matthias Herrmann and Martin Guttmann, and graduated in 2013.