Working with analog photography Tina Lechner uses her camera as an instrument to explore identity, depicting subjectivity, opening the gaze to an apocalyptic vision of later (post-) modernity. While the photos capture a strong surface - gauging the whole range of possibility of black and white photography - the human body is coated in self-produced requisites, decidedly unsettling, suggesting some sort of strange, science fiction-esque rebirth, undermining the cultural construction of femininity. It borrows from the convicti- on that humankind has lost control over its own creatures in such that even though the female body is always the nucleus of her images, it becomes a retro-futuristic sculpture combining elements of a magical and cyborg identity, blurring the line between human and inanima. Lechner’s work is a timeless amalgamation of styles, techniques and cultu- ral references that make her work so original, so striking. Tina Lechner brings together the difficulty of dual discourses of photography as an object and image, cutting out the “either-or” and embracing the notion of Ernst Gombrich‘s “either-and”. Her achronic visual language refers back to the early 1920/30s but becomes unique through her modification of that exact visual codification.
