Loretta Lux - athens

Loretta Lux is a painter and her training in this medium has enabled her to construct photographs using her painting techniques. "I still think as a paitner, especially in terms of strcuturing a picture... I carefully choose the models, costumes, requisites, and backdrops of my photographs." As photography is growing and new technology had developed, this gives rise to many new elements and uses, combining art and media. "Usually i work with a digital camera and compose my works digitally or give them a finish on the computer, in order to make them meet my ideas perfectly." Her images of changelings are described as beautiful, extremely formal and chilling. The children in her images usually pose alone in either bleak landscapes or bare interiors, unsmiling with wide empty eyes. Lux expressed that her images portray a "forlorness as a basic experience of human existence." More noticeable, though, is the photographic context of childhood itself.

Lux's native Germany is the land of Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwelpeter. Also the child-snatching Erlkoenig and the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Germany is not the only country that has produced this creepy netherworld for children thoughout the years. Young children around the world sit staring wide-eyed through the dark violence of movies such as Spider-man or Batman and revel in the story of Lemony Snicket's 'Series of Unfortunate Events' Bruno Bettelheim reminds us in the Uses of Enchantment: children love entertainment and fantasy, and for good reason. In the simplicity of the good and evil characters "the child gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos which is his inner life." Lux's focus on forlornness within her images could relate to the inappropriate way in which individuals, in retro-blindness, envision childhood. Of course, as simple as she indicates; childhood is as chaotic and varied as any other part of life.

"I don't have a motherly eye. I enjoy working with children because they are genuine; they don't wear masks." Lux descibes her images of children as 'imaginiary portraits', and this may lead us to conclude that they are not real, that they are surreal. In her words "the creative will to making a reality that differs from what I find in memory and imagination." These children are, in fact, a creation of Lux's imagination; as fictional as the work of the grand masters that she so admired, but also non-fictional and completely unique.