Susan Burnstine was born in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles.
she is one of the few photographers to use alternative processes to create an idiosyncratic and deeply personal visual landscape. Following a devastating trauma at the age of six, SB developed severe night terrors, the consequences of which would unconsciously follow her for days on end. Often, she would see an image or symbol in her waking life, but didn't know whether it was something real or something she'd been dreaming about.
Early on, she learned to recreate the dreams she'd had the night before by translating them into an art form. This process helped her enormously and became a fundamental approach to the creation of her personal work.
Later she began to reinterpret her dreams using photography. She then tried to recreate the appearance of her unconscious world using every type of known cameras: 35 mm, medium format, large format, as well as all alternative printing methods, but nothing worked. So she decided to create her first prototype camera in 2005, about a year after starting her project.
Her creative process is extremely intuitive and unplanned, she uses her camera to capture a subject conveying a symbol or metaphor of her dream, enabling her to reinterpret it on film.
Galerie Catherine & André Hug
Founded in 2000 in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Galerie Catherine et André Hug has chosen photography to explore the medium's mode of expression. The gallery selects classic documentary artists, or those who prefer a fictional form, whose work questions reality, the narrative potential of the image, or the exploration of the dream that inhabits man.