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Stefanie Moshammer: “Not Just Your Face Honey”

An open photobook displays a car raised on jacks with graffiti on its rear. Text on the left reads: Photobooks Episode 4, Stefanie Moshammer Not Just Your Face Honey.

Questioning The Appeal of the American Dream

Photobook Reviews, Episode 4 – by Kate Schultze

I vividly remember Stefanie Moshammer’s show for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018. A love letter, blue skies, palm trees, cacti in a suburban American neighbourhood and a truck with heightened wheels and a bold font spelling “Suck Dick” on the boot. An image that, admittedly, stuck with me for these 6 years.

A photo book open to a page showing the rear of a battered car with large tires; the cars back has SUCK DICK written on it in large letters. The background is dark and the ground appears dirty.

Publisher

Spector Books

Layout

Hardcover, 22×28,5cm, 144 pages

Price

28 €

Link

co-berlin.org

In very few words, this describes the essence of images in Moshammer’s book Not Just Your Face Honey published by Spector Books in 2018, accompanying her exhibition at C/O Berlin. Stefanie Moshammer is an Austrian photographic artist. Whilst working on another series, she finds herself in a suburb in Las Vegas, Nevada, when a random man knocks on her door looking for his ex-girlfriend. They have a very brief conversation and a few days later Moshammer gets sent a full on love letter by this stranger named Troy Charles. Troy asks her to stay in the US, offering to buy her a car, to move in with him, to be the key to US citizenship, claiming he will be the next big American celebrity in the making and she would make a great addition to this lifestyle.
A hand holds open a book to a page with a color photo of a pink typed letter on the right side, placed on a dark textured background. The left page is blank. The book rests on a wooden surface.
An open book on a wooden surface shows two black-and-white photos: the top is a shadowy figure walking past a building, the bottom is a person walking on a sidewalk in front of houses and parked cars.

In Not Just Your Face Honey Moshammer creates images depicting the so-called American dream, or at least objects, interiors and exteriors associated with it. Desert landscapes, suburban houses, road signs, defamiliarised portraits put together in something that feels like chapters categorised by excerpts of the love letter by Troy Charles. The bright and colours and high contrast as well as minimal black and white photographs of the urban landscape play with the style of classic American photographers like Robert Adams or William Eggleston with a more contemporary touch. As Lauren Kelly says in the British Journal of Photography: “For Moshammer, these images are a mix of fiction and non-fiction, which convey both her perception of Charles’ proposition, and key photographic themes of “reality versus storytelling”.

An open book shows a page with a gloved hand holding a dollar bill and a pearl bracelet, and another page with a yellow towel folded into a swirl shape, resembling a horn, on a bed with small decorative items nearby.
An open book lies on a wooden surface. The right page displays a pink-toned, faceless silhouette of a person in a fitted dress, while the left page is mostly blank.

If you are interested in more stories inspired by investigating specific characters or subcultures that explore the topics illusion and reality you should definitely check out Dear Clark by Sara-Lena Maierhofer and Why Can’t You Globeheads Reason? by Charlotte Hansel.

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