On the photo art of Iris Weirich 

My idols are to be found behind the movie camera. Inspired by the painture-like camera-shots in films by David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Alain Resnais and Pedro Almodóvar, I started to take pictures in the early 1990's, driven by the desire to apply a movie-like atmosphere to my photographs; back then, before the dawning of the digital age, still exclusively by combining various photo filters, most of them painted by myself with transparent colours. Cinematic imagination has always been part of my life. When my mother, an actress, told or read stories to me, it was also a visual experience for me: I felt like watching living pictures. 

My childhood among an unconventional theatre family and my former obsession with self-invented absurd role plays, were the breeding-ground for my odd fantasy and have evoked a strong sense of theatrical vision. My interest in photography doesn’t consist in depicting pure reality, but in adding a mysterious quality to my pictures by alienating the seen. David Lynch once mentioned in an interview that he could even get lost in coffee-froth for a camera shot. There’s no better way to express my own enthusiasm at taking pictures. I get my kicks out of creating small artificial worlds and telling their stories in photographic images. Art means to me the extension of creative boundaries and the translation into symbolic dimensions, it is an homage to the mysteries in our world. I am particularly interested in the possibilities of mise-en-scène photography. 

By the interaction of cinematic, theatrical, painture-like and narrative elements during the process of taking pictures and the subsequent post-processing, there can be created an individual universe. It really inspires me that my photos are frequently associated with paintings, since, what enthuses me most about photo editing, the possibility of achieving effects which are usually only expected in the creative freedom of painting. 

Text: Iris Weirich, 2011 © Iris Weirich, 2011