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STAGED PHOTOGRAPHY II

In an era where reality is endlessly edited, filtered, and performed, staged photography pushes even further — constructing worlds that feel more vivid, more precise, and at times more believable than life itself.  These images don’t just document; they manufacture experience. Rooted in the idea of hyperreality - a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, artists create fictions so finely detailed they rival — and often replace — the real. 

In this issue, we explore how these constructed realities seduce and unsettle us. 




Andreas Gursky, Les Mées (2016)
Image Courtesy: Sprüth Magers


Can staged realities tell us more about ourselves than real life ever could?

When images feel truer than truth itself, can we still trust what we see? Or have we already lost the ability - or the will - to tell the difference?

How does hyperreality alter the way we remember, dream, or even imagine?


01: Study

Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) 1993
Transparency in lightbox
229 x 377 cm | 90 3/16 x 148 7/16 in.
Image Courtesy: White Cube

Compositing

Since the early days of photography, artists have sought to push beyond the camera’s documentary function and explore the medium’s capacity for invention. In the 19th century, photographers like Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson created composite prints by layering multiple negatives to build theatrical, often allegorical scenes. What began as analog ingenuity has evolved—through the rise of digital tools—into a complex visual language that blurs the line between fact and fiction.


In the realm of staged photography, composition transcends mere arrangement—it becomes a deliberate act of constructing reality. Stephen Shore once remarked, "A photographer solves a picture more than composes one," emphasizing the problem-solving nature of framing and structure . This perspective aligns with the Rule of Thirds, a compositional guideline that divides the frame into nine equal parts, positioning key elements along these lines or their intersections to create balance and visual interest.

In this section, we delve into the compositional strategies that underpin hyperreal imagery, exploring how deliberate framing and structure invite viewers into meticulously constructed worlds.




Jeff Wall – Study for A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993



Jeff Wall – Untitled, production photo, A Sudden Gust of Wind, Richmond, B.C., Winter 1993







Valérie Belin, Electra (Lady Stardust) , 2023



Part of her Lady Stardust series, this work features a young woman adorned in distinctive attire, set against a meticulously crafted backdrop. Belin's approach involves a seamless fusion of the living body with inanimate elements, creating a hyperreal image that challenges viewers' perceptions. The series draws inspiration from various sources, including fashion, mythology, and popular culture, resulting in photographs that are both visually captivating and conceptually rich. (IRK Magazine)







Karen Knorr, Corridor, Musée Carnavalet, 2007, Fables 2003–2022

They are metaphors for human behaviour along with being sorts of memento mori, symbolising transience. The works also play around with the idea of illusion and reality. Photography in this case wields ability to rejuvenate the dead in these series.

- Karen Knorr, Explores Migrating Fables and Animals in Her Photography, Stir World, 2021







Noèmie Goudal, Les Amants (Cascade), 2009 Image courtesy: Saatchi Gallery





What if the Internet had a body? In his DUMBO studio, artist Daniel Gordon photographs paper collages constructed from found images downloaded from the Web. "I like to think about what I'm doing as an optimistic version of appropriation," says Gordon, who wonders if he can transport digital images into real life by giving them a physical form. The artist's paper tableaus, rich in vibrant colors and vivid patterns, are transformed in the process of making a picture with large format cameras.






Fenella Kernebone speaks in conversation with two of the worlds leading international photographers, Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand. Hear the artists reflect on their practices and the process of putting together a photography exhibition.







Go behind the scenes on Stan Douglas' historical recreation of Penn Station in the first half of 20th century. Produced over a four-day photography shoot in Vancouver, during which over four hundred actors were scanned and re-dressed in one of five hundred unique period costumes, before being posed digitally. The architectural elements were created through an intensive CG post-production process carried out by an Emmy-nominated visual effects studio.





02. Listen
We revisit an old episode of A Brush With... by The Art Newspaper, featuring Stan Douglas, the multidisciplinary Canadian artist. Douglas shares his early fascination with Marcel Duchamp, reflects on the lasting influence of artists as varied as Francisco de Goya and Agnes Martin, and speaks about his enduring obsession with Samuel Beckett. He also reveals how Miles Davis’s underrated album On the Corner inspired one of his most acclaimed works, Luanda-Kinshasa (2013).





I had to shoot almost every person indivisually, but still trying to keep a sense of what they were doing as a crowd. So I just shoot them in layers, like first the nearest person, then go back further and further and direct them as I went.


Stan Douglas spoke about the making of Penn Station


Stan Douglas, 20 june 1930, 20 june 1944, and 20 june 1957 from ‘penn station’s half century’, 2020
ceramic ink on glass |  one of nine photographic panels from ‘penn station’s half century’
image courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy empire state development and public art fund, NY

03. Read



In his seminal 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, Junichirō Tanizaki reflects on aesthetics, illusion, and the quietly constructed beauty of shadow. His meditations on light and darkness offer a profound counterpoint to the hyperreal clarity that dominates much of modern image-making. 


The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” the architect Louis Kahn said, “until it fell on the wall of a building.


If light is scarce, then light is scarce; they immerse themselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.

- Junichirō Tanizaki, ¨In Praise of Shadows¨


Junichirō Tanizaki photographed by Shigeru Tamura


04: Photobooks


Visual Spaces of Today (MACK)
Andreas Gursky
Published for Fondazione MAST’s tenth anniversary, this catalogue marks the first Italian exhibition of Andreas Gursky. Known for his monumental, hyperreal images, Gursky captures the structures of globalization—from factories to financial centers—with striking precision. Featuring forty-one works and an essay by curator Urs Stahel, the book reveals Gursky’s sharp vision of contemporary production and consumption.

Exposures (Steidl & Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago)Barbara ProbstBarbara Probst’s Exposures series dismantles the illusion of photographic truth through a strikingly conceptual approach. Each work in the series captures a single moment from multiple viewpoints using synchronized cameras, revealing how radically perspective can alter perception. The result is a multi-panel presentation of the same instant, staged yet destabilizing—what we see is both real and unreal.

Valérie Belin (Damiani)Valérie Belin
Valérie Belin’s work explores the boundary between matter and the living, using light, texture, and precise staging to create images filled with ambiguity and absence. This volume presents her series from 2007 to 2016, including Fruit Baskets, Brides, and All Star, along with performance and exhibition documentation. Together, they reveal a photographic practice that blurs reality and illusion in striking, hyperreal compositions.

Modern Romance (St. Ann´s Press)David LevinthalDavid Levinthal’s Modern Romance draws inspiration from film noir and Edward Hopper, staging moody urban scenes that feel both familiar and elusive. Faceless figures linger in shadowy settings—street corners, motel rooms, subways—inviting the viewer to step in as voyeur or narrator. Blurring reality and fiction, these images evoke solitude, desire, and the unsettling quiet of city life.

Drape Limited Edition Boxset (The Ravestijn Gallery)
Eva StenramThe series ‘Drape’ shown here, consisting of a mixture of black & white and colour images, she manipulated vintage pin-up photos of women who had been photographed in front of an interior curtain or drape. Stenram digitally extended the curtains to conceal the head and the naked torso, whilst the legs and arms are still shown.

The Complete Papers (MACK)Thomas DemandThe Complete Papers is an extensive volume encompassing all of Thomas Demand’s work over the past 28 years, together with the primary texts written about his practice. The book includes previously unseen early works from 1990, together with reference reproductions on every one of his pieces.

Carpe Diem (Hatje Cantz)
Frank KunertFollowing his illustrated volumes Topsy-Turvy World, Wonderland and Lifestyle, Carpe Diem reveals the contradictions of our existence—between euphoria and impending misery. Comedy and tragedy are closely intertwined in the work of model maker and photographer: Kunert leads us into a parallel universe that seems surreal yet strangely familiar. 


Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography (Stemmle)Michael Kohler; Zdenek Felix; and Andreas VowinckelSince the early 1980s, there has arisen a distinctive genre of staged photography. Artists such as Sandy Skoglund, Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and Jeff Koons have redefined the traditionally accepted verities of photography, constructing surreal, futuristic, and metaphorical tableaux and then recording them with photographs.


Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman Anti-Fashion is the first to focus on this close engagement with fashion and approaches her photographic oeuvre from a new perspective. In so doing, it sheds light on the interplay between art and fashion.




Julie Blackmon
Blackmon constructs a captivating, fictitious world that is both playful and menacing. “I think of myself as a visual artist working in the medium of photography," Blackmon notes, "and my assignment is to chart the fever dreams of American life.”

05. From the Community
We met Nhu Xuan Hua in Paris and were struck by how immersed she was in every detail of her process—from props and sets to the conceptual groundwork behind each shoot. In her project Tropism, published by Area Books, Hua blends digital manipulation with instinctive image-making to revisit and transform family photographs. What begins as a personal inquiry into memory expands into a broader reflection on the Vietnamese diaspora, linking the intimate with the political, and addressing how history continues to shape identity and representation. Her return to Vietnam in 2016 marked the start of this ongoing process of reconnection.


It’s an invitation for a treasure hunt on paper
Images mapping a route connecting past and present
The contour of a familiar crowd
is stating a country
Merging places and people.
He, She, They, Here and There become one
after having been set apart for so long.
They have been sent to wait until it comes.

- From the introductory poem in Tropism by Nhu Xuan Hua (Area Books, 2023).