Artist Lecture: Henrieke Strecker

Background: Henrieke Strecker is a photographer who began her career in her homeland, Russia. She moved to the United States in 2007, and currently teaches photography at Plymouth State University.

She started out her lecture with a brief history of herself, and the entire presentation was a slideshow of her a few pieces of work, integrated with an essay or excerpt from her past. It was really interesting the way she made her essays come together with her photographs, as if the stories were the title to her work. In fact, she chooses not to title her work because it doesn't give the viewers a chance to think about it. Titles, in her opinion, just freely gives away what we were trying to accomplish rather than having us think for ourselves as we get lost into the photograph. Therefore, the pieces of writing that she read aloud gave us a little bit of background information as to the motives she had behind her work.
One of the most surprising facts she revealed through her speech was the fact that she does not use a view finder. She finds that in order to take a photograph, we need to just be in the present moment instead of thinking about how to occupy the frame. She included that "lenses become a distraction" because it is just one more thing between the subject and the raw image. This is why she loves taking pinholes and even making her own pinhole cameras. It is a more natural way to do photography, with less intrusions to the process.
Another thing I found fascinating was her Pinhole Portrait of War. It is a self-portrait of Henrieke repeatedly saying the word "war" for ten minutes. I like the way the photograph turned out, but I am not sure about her decision to write out the actual work "WAR" on the photograph. Although it isn't titled "War," she gives it away in the photograph itself. I haven't decided whether I like the up-front-ness of that, or whether I would have rather liked the ambiguity of her mouth looking like it is mouthing something, but the audience is supposed to figure out what is going on.