Newspaper NV, Nr.3, BENY STEINER

3 FUNDAZIUN

CHASTÈ DA TARASP

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August 7 – October 31 2021

cover Tango for Splash, 1988 Model Stephan, styling Lesile Lambert, make-up Sigfried, hair Christopher for Bruno le Salon thank you Dana Belkova, Pascal Hoffmann, Samuele Mancini, Hannes Ortner, Eric Powell, Basile Ribas, Andrè Roth, Rafael Schilt, Rea Anna Steiner, Patrick John Steiner and Franz Tragust publisher Fundaziun Not Vital Chastè da Tarasp, Switzerland curator Giorgia von Albertini artist Beny Steiner text Giorgia von Albertini graphic design Süsskind SGD layout Giorgia von Albertini edition 400 -

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BENY STEINER

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BENY STEINER Beny Steiner, born Bernadette Steiner in 1950 in the Swiss mountain village of Klosters, has always forged her own path.

In the late 1960s, H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist known for his visualization of Ridley Scott’s Alien, convinced Beny to abandon the provincial town of Chur and move to Zurich. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 17, she met her first partner and left Zurich for Kabul. Upon returning to Europe, she quickly found work as a model, which took her all over Europe — to Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Barcelona.

The few stylists that existed in 1970s Europe were located mostly in Paris or Milan; models on the road in other locations usually had to bring along their own clothing and do their own styling, hairdos, and make-up. In consequence, Beny acquired invaluable experience, both professionally and socially, posing, for instance, for Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués.

A quirk of fate in the early 1980s launched Beny’s career as a stylist. While on a shoot in Sri Lanka for the Swiss Magazine Annabelle, she was asked to step in at the last minute because the official stylist had defaulted. Having subsequently made a name for herself as an idiosyncratic and somewhat anachronistic stylist, favoring timeless classics over fast fashion, Beny soon began to work with such renowned photographers as the Swiss-American Raymond Meier.

When she started out as a self-taught photographer in 1987, she was not particularly interested in perfectly mastering the technical intricacies of the medium, and many of her productions did without elaborate styling. Although most of her photography was produced for fashion magazines, she was more interested in her models, essentially treating the clothes as props rather than as central elements of the shoot.

In a 1988 editorial titled “Tango” for the New York magazine Splash, the male model Stephan appears in sharp but minimal black Commes de Garçons outfits. The images (shot on a rooftop in New York City) evoke a mood that distantly emulates the simplicity and sensuality of South American tango, though without any explicit references. The black-and-white photographs are grainy and raw, and the background is blurred: Stephan’s distinctive face and features are the focus of attention.

In the 1990s, Beny’s friends and family started serving as models for her shoots, informing her images with a sense of authenticity and an atmosphere of complicity. She has never had a professional studio and often uses her home and the homes of her friends and family as locations. In 1994, she photographed a story for the Swiss merchandiser Pandinavia at her parent’s home in the mountain village of San Bernardino.

One of the images shows Beny’s mother Katherina and her friend Luisa against a backdrop of theatrically draped black fabric. Wearing simple white T-shirts and shorts, they hold up sausages and knives, their dirty aprons testifying to real work.

(At the time, Katherina was running a general store in San Bernardino where she sold anything from sandwiches to cigarettes and buttons.) In another image from the same story, three men who were working on the construction of the now legendary San Bernardino tunnel are pictured, greasy-haired and weary, posing with the immense tire of a construction machine. Once again, Beny has skillfully pitted the authenticity of her subjects and the originality of the location against a theatrical background: she strung up black fabric and draped it like a curtain between the simple brick wall and the three laborers. This theatrical artifice is straightforward, honest, and even ironic: the cord and clips remain visible, and the curtain is debunked as such.

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In a series for the Italian magazine Galatea, Beny photographed her agent’s mother, Virginia Torsellini, in their family home in Tuscany. On one of the images, Virginia sits in her garden on a sun lounger. Ensconced in white pillows and wearing a white hooded bathrobe that covers part of her grey hair, she is nonchalantly dangling her right (bejeweled) hand in a hand bath.

Despite the luxury and drama of the scene, there is something very real and normal both about the setting and the protagonist: the flagstones in the garden are overgrown; Virginia’s gaze is relaxed and uninhibited; and the straightforward portrait makes no attempt to airbrush away her age.

The blend of theatricality and real life in these works, shot respectively in San Bernardino and Tuscany, exemplifies Beny’s modus operandi. For her, theatricality is a tool that she puts to candid, unabashed use; she does not exploit it, in disguise, as it were, to achieve a perfectly staged image. Her sitters and their role-playing are equally undisguised, the props are treated as props and not as a means of rendering reality, and the locations are selected to accommodate the story without surrendering their singularity. Beny essentially constructs a theatre of the real, which is faithful to the imperfections of reality while simultaneously celebrating the poetics of drama.

Since moving to Scuol in 2008, a village close to our foundation, Beny Steiner has continued to devote herself to her craft, creating her inimitable, distinctive portraits and landscape images against the background of real places and with real people as her models.

Giorgia von Albertini

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Virginia for Galatea, 1996 Styling Luca Capelli, hair and make-up Matteo Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Mocaio for Galatea, 1996 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Virginia for Galatea, 1996 Styling Luca Capelli, hair and make-up Matteo Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Salvia for Galatea, 1996 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Il Pomeriggio for Splash, 1988 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 31.5 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Il giorgno al mare for Galatea, 1996 Models Virginia, Aurore and Arno, styling Luca Capelli, hair and make-up Roberto Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 31.5 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

For Elisabeth Bossard, 1995 Models Melanie, Ursi and Gail, styling Elisabeth Bossard, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Gail for Elisabeth Bossard, 1995 Styling Elisabeth Bossard, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Drillinge, 1989 Models Patrick and Ulla with children, styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Roberto Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 80 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Ulla, 1989 Styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Roberto Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Tango for Splash, 1988 Model Stephan, styling Lesile Lambert, make-up Sigfried, hair Christopher for Bruno le Salon Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 80 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Tango for Splash, 1988 Model Stephan, styling Lesile Lambert, make-up Sigfried, hair Christopher for Bruno le Salon Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 80 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Tango for Splash, 1988 Model Morrison, styling Lesile Lambert, make-up Sigfried, hair Christopher for Bruno le Salon Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 20 x 31 cm each Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Michelle for Galatea, 1996 Styling Lucia Capelli, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Yvonne for Grau, 1996 Styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Yvonne and Ishi for Grau, 1996 Styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Lisa and Fabian for Pandinavia, 1996 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 A -

Luca for Pandinavia, 1996 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Andrè for Pandinavia, 1996 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Lisa for Pandinavia, 1996 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner, hair and make-up Maciria Rodrigues Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Lou for Pandinavia, 1994 Concept Busch‘n Bull, Styling Beny Steiner Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Luisa and Katherina for Pandinavia, 1994 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Tunnel workers for Pandinavia, 1994 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Portrait of Artist Fiore de Henriquez, 1997 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Peter for Pandinavia, 1994 Concept Busch‘n Bull, styling Beny Steiner Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 80 x 50 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Maia and Gail in Quiberville, 1993 Styling Gail Just, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Jenny in Quiberville, 1993 Styling Gail Just, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Gail and Agnes in Quiberville, 1993 Styling Gail Just, hair and make-up Robert Vetica Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

For YOU, 1997 Styling Mirelle Comstock, hair and make-up Clelia Bergonzoli Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Portrait of Ishi and Lampo, 1995 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

Self-portrait for Annabelle, 1997 Print on Rag Photographique 310 g Canson Infinity 50 x 31.5 cm Ed. 4 + 1 AP -

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