In Character

In Character is the first monograph by Anja Niemi (born 1976), a Norwegian artist working in photography. The book presents six series featuring characters performed by Niemi.

“I want to ask questions about identity, and about what it is to be a woman, to be human, but not about what it is to be me.”

Niemi describes her work as stories without words. A conversation between Max Houghton and the artist reveals a cornucopia of influences from Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman to David Lynch and Frida Kahlo. Houghton also references the Victorian tableaux of Julia Margaret Cameron, with literary scenes performed for the camera. Gregory Crewdson’s single image narratives also come to mind.

Niemi says that she would call herself a self-portraitist, but has lost confidence in the term in this age of the selfie. She makes herself into other people the same way a drag artist is transformed into a character, and fittingly, RuPaul is quoted in the book. Niemi works in her shed, building a character with wigs, make-up, costume and sets. Her solitary working method makes her the director, cinematographer, set designer and actress. She describes this process as “wanting to be another”.

The series Do Not Disturb shows various odd scenes in a hotel room, as if a woman was locked in and eventually started losing their mind. She begins to experiment with random acts of surrealism, face first on the bed, or her head packed into a suitcase.

The Starlets series performs femininity through stereotypes: ‘The Showgirl’, ‘The Starlet’, ‘The Bride’, ‘The Mistress’. They are hysterical multiples, murderously duelling in claustrophobic spaces. The physicality of the athletic ‘Rollergirl’ contrasts with ‘The Still Life’, a Dutch Golden Age painting disrupted by Alfred Hitchcock. The influence of David Lynch can be traced in the twin character motif, and the neat retro visuals where something unsettling bubbles under the surface.

Niemi encounters the character of Darlene through imagined forensics. The artist discovered the suitcase of a beauty product saleswoman from the early 1960s, complete with sales receipts. Darlene fills the gaps of the unknown story with visual fiction. California sun washes the images with a dusty desert palette.

Short Stories is a series of polaroids, some suggesting a criminal heist, some perhaps a woman’s disappearance. The series includes photographs of nature, heavy with atmospheric darkness. Here, Niemi photographs evocative objects as portraits of things, observing revealing details.

The Woman Who Never Existed infuses showgirl feathers and theatre masks with mortality. With echoes of Francesca Woodman, she vanishes into the wallpaper, slips out the door and off the stage. She Could Have Been a Cowboy, the most recent work, goes to the Grand Canyon. Niemi becomes a cowboy in the desert, a performance only witnessed by the monumental landscape. Perhaps anyone can be a cowboy with the right outfit and attitude.

Niemi has a singular eye for colour, and her aesthetic is somehow very ‘now’. The precision of her visual world suggests the most adventurous corners of contemporary fashion photography. Although she examines identity and the self, those main obsessions of the social media age, refreshingly she looks far beyond herself. Her lens is broader, capturing universal themes: becoming, being, creating and finally, disappearing.

 – Reviewed by Riikka Kuittinen

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Anja Niemi: In Character, with supporting text and interview by Max Houghton, was published by Thames & Hudson