An apparition of memory © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 983 x 983 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

This week we are featuring Still Life projects, and on Friday we finish with a 4-part Exhibition on Still Lifes!

I first met Swiss photographer Brigitte Lustenberger over 20 years ago when we both lived in New York City. Since then, I have followed her work through the occasional exhibition announcement or email update. While the aesthetics shift from project to project, themes of life, death, transience, and beauty quietly underpin her work.

After working for years in the somber tones associated with classical still life painting, Lustenberger’s most recent project “An Apparition of Memory” makes a striking departure. The photos are both starkly minimal and sumptuously beautiful. While their backgrounds are a clinical white, the detailed forms of her floral subjects are both colorful and intricately detailed. As a lover of flowers and beauty, I am transfixed.

I can hear the deep rasp of your laughter © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 983 x 799 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Brigitte Lustenberger, born in Zurich, studied social and photographic history at the University of Zurich, where she completed her thesis on the photographs of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro from the Spanish Civil War. In 2006, she earned her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School of Design in New York.

Lustenberger is an award-winning artist who exhibits her work both nationally and internationally. Her most notable accolades include the Merck Prize (2018) from the Darmstädter Fototage, the Grand Prize Winner PDNedu, the Golden Light Award, the Photography Award of the Canton of Bern (2002, 2013), the Landis&Gyr Grant (2013), the Prix Photoforum (2005), as well as the Art Grant (2018) and the Artist Book Grant (2022) from the Canton of Bern. 2025 was she awarded with the Jungck Prize for Women Artists.

Her work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including solo shows at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Museum Franz Gertsch, and La Chambre in Strasbourg. Additional presentations include the Saatchi Gallery in London, the platform Fotomuseum Winterthur, Kunsthalle Bern, Photo London, Unseen Amsterdam, La Filature in Mulhouse, Paris Photo, and the Walter Keller and Christophe Guye Galleries. A major on-site installation featuring 40 large-format images was shown at the old cemetery in Monthey. Her monograph «An Apparition of Memory» was shortlisted for the Most Beautiful German Books. Lustenberger has also taught as a guest lecturer at the University of Basel and the Bern University of the Arts.

I was lost in the wilderness of my mind © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 983 x 1093 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

In my artistic practice, I engage deeply with the photographic medium, particularly its inherent connection to transience, memory, and the fragility of life. A central aspect of my work is a critical examination of the representation of the female body in photography and the dynamics of seeing and being seen.

My work exists at the intersection of craft, art, and science. Using photographic processes that I often develop myself, I fragment, deconstruct, and reassemble images to challenge my own gaze. Themes of impermanence and aging are reflected not only in the subjects I photograph but also in the materiality of the works themselves. I combine wall-based photographs with spatial installations and often bring together analog and digital photography, allowing historical and contemporary photographic techniques to converge. It is within this dialogue that my photographic practice unfolds: as a continuous process of searching, questioning, and looking. – Brigitte Lustenberger

As long as forever lasts © Brigitte Lustenberger 2026 Archival pigment print Sheet 1332 x 983 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

While your projects include portraits, sculpture, and installation, every project has some element(s) of still life.  What is it about still life that appeals to you?

My still lifes almost exclusively depict what has already begun to disappear: withered flowers, dead insects, animals or decaying plants.

While Baroque vanitas paintings often juxtaposed flowers in full bloom with signs of decay and mortality, my still lifes focus on the quiet beauty of what remains. I am drawn to the later stages of life, where change, fragility and time become visible.

Still life has never been just a genre for me; it is a way of reflecting on transience and on what decay reveals about ourselves and the society we live in. Inspired by the tradition of Baroque vanitas paintings, I see still life not as a collection of symbolic objects but as a way of speaking about ourselves. I see still life as a visual language. Every still life is ultimately about people. Flowers, fruit and everyday objects become protagonists that invite us to imagine our own stories.

My still lifes revolve around photography’s central paradox: although photography was invented to preserve life, every photograph quietly reminds us that the moment has already passed. Wilted flowers, dead insects and fragile objects become collaborators in exploring time, memory and transformation, inviting viewers to imagine their own stories.

On a more personal level, the process of creating these still lifes offers me a rare sense of slowness. It invites me to observe subtle changes, to spend time with things that are usually overlooked, and to discover beauty in fragility. Sometimes my studio feels like a cabinet of curiosities, where the beauty of things that have been discarded continues to unfold.

Recently, I have begun creating still lifes using casts of my own body as part of A Gaze of One’s Own. Here, still life becomes a way of reflecting on the female gaze and on the absence of reference images for many female bodies. The casts are no longer read as a portrait of myself, but as quiet objects that invite a different way of seeing

Later I will consider what I have seen © Brigitte Lustenberger 2026 Archival pigment print Sheet 983 x 1034 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Your recent project “An Apparition of Memory” features flowers seemingly in suspended animation.  Can you talk about the process of making these images and how you came to it?

An Apparition of Memory feels like a new language of flower photography. Yet it is not about flowers as botanical specimens, but about their quiet transience, their gentle disappearance, reminding us of the fleeting nature of life.

In my unique photographic process, dried and wilting blossoms replace the light-sensitive emulsion on old glass slides. Immersed in water, they gradually become the emulsion itself. As with a photographic slide, light passes through it, transforming it into fragile photographic images that reveal traces of time and the beauty of transience.

There is one aspect I did not anticipate when I began the series. Although no longer alive, the flowers unfold a delicate dynamism, reminiscent of a dance in timeless weightlessness. Again and again, they seem to break free from the confines of the glass, unfolding into vivid, individual gestures.

The photographs reveal details invisible to the naked eye—filigree structures that testify to the extraordinary architecture of nature. As the flowers lose their botanical identity, they become singular beings, each with its own presence and story, , like a portrait quietly evoking the traces of a life. Their titles, borrowed from songs, films, television series and poems, weave another layer of meaning into the work.

Now is not a time © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 983 x 921 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or publications you would like to share?

I first discovered the process while working with dead insects I found in my studio, located in an old industrial warehouse. I presented them as projections using vintage slide projectors. Years later, I began experimenting with flowers using the same process. Unlike the insects, however, the blossoms were too dense to be projected. Instead, I started to enlarge them as photographic prints.

Until August 30, I have a solo exhibition «A Gaze of One’s Own» at Museum Franz Gertsch in Switzerland: https://www.museum-franzgertsch.ch/en/exhibitions/brigittelustenberger

The exhibition catalogue has just been published and includes texts in both German and English: https://www.museum-franzgertsch.ch/de/shop/kataloge/brigitte-lustenberger

In November, I plan to present my work at Paris Photo with Galerie Esther Woerdehoff.

«An Apparition of Memory» has been published as a monograph by Hatje Cantz: https://hatjecantz.de/en/products/65423-brigitte-lustenberger

Between mists of memory © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 383 x 314 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Kaleidoscopic vision © Brigitte Lustenberger 2023 Archival pigment print Sheet 383 x 505 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Edge of Tenderness 2026 Archival pigment print 800 x 800 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Elastic Memory – A Gaze of One‘s Own © Brigitte Lustenberger 2026 Archival pigment print 400 x400 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Birds 2011 C Print 1000 x 1250 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Flowers I © Brigitte Lustenberger 2008 C Print 1000 x 800 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Flowers XIX © Brigitte Lustenberger 2016 Archival pigment print 800 x 1000 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Flowers X © Brigitte Lustenberger 2013 C Print 400 x 320 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP

Flowers XXXIX © Brigitte Lustenberger 2016 C Print 400 x 320 mm Edition von 3 plus 2 AP