Loretta Lux specialises in photographs of children, often children of her friends, with the occasional adult or self-portrait. A former painter, Lux, 38, pays attention to form, shape and colour. “I don’t care about traditional photography I want more control.” The images, which can take up to a year to complete, are less about the subjects than they are a metaphor for the idea of childhood. “I want people to decide what to see,” she says. Whatever they do decide, they’re not likely to forget it.
Her portraits are carefully controlled at every stage of production:
- The formality of the poses she selects at the shooting stage, often using vintage outfits, including some of Lux’s own childhood things.
- Digital adjusted features: Elongated limbs, oversized heads, and eyes spaced just a little farther apart than average contribute to the strangeness of their cool gazes and isolated locations.
- Merging the subjects with their settings: she strips out the background and replaces it with a quiet setting–a grassy field, an abandoned building–either painted by Lux or taken from her photographs of various European landscapes and interiors. Then she erases any object that crowds the picture, like a tree or toy, so the child appears to be part of a dream.
- Using a narrow pastel palette in the final prints.
- The final images are produced as luminous Ilfochrome prints.
Loretta Lux was born in 1969 in Dresden, Germany. She studied painting at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich from 1990 to 1996. She began photographing in 1999 and produces about half a dozen finished pictures each year. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York; Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam. Her photographs have also been featured in exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in its 2006 exhibition In Sight. She is the recipient of a Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis (2002) and The International Centre of Photography’s Infinity Award for Art (2005).