Young women and girls pose in front of the camera. They waver between self-confidence and insecurity, rehearsing the gestures of models and perhaps even harbouring the desire to become models themselves. In her research, photographer and artist Ruth Erdt defines a “casting system,” staging and photographing young women in her photo studio in Zurich-Schwamendingen.
The photographs taken in the studio reveal the professional photographer who lends her unmistakable signature to her images, the poses of the young models betray vulnerability and ambivalence.
In February of this year, Ruth Erdt travelled to India to photograph young women and girls in an improvised studio setting in Bombay and the surrounding area. Ruth Erdt asked herself whether the system she had defined in Zurich would work in India. In her travelogue and documentation of her stay in India, she reveals herself as an artist who takes on a challenging task and encounters limitations in the process, with her camera always at her side.
On three floors, in the large room of Perla-Mode, in the basement and on the first floor, in the message salon, Ruth Erdt presents a multipart installation that addresses various aspects of the medium of photography, including photography in its most original form: the photogram. The photographer placed a girl wearing ice skates directly on coated photographic paper and exposed it to light.