Oliver Schneider

User Bio

Oliver Schneider, born 1971, lives and works in Berlin /Germany
Artist, Photographer, Freelance Art-Director, co-editor of "Actual colors may vary" and co-founder of earthfaves.

randomat.org/photography
is my photography portfolio site.

actualcolorsmayvary.com/blog
is an online magazine focusing mainly on photography & music, with a side dish of art, design, film and nice places worldwide. Founded in late 2010, ACMV is edited by Julia Schiller and myself, Oliver Schneider and features distinctive work from an international community of emerging and established photographers, artists and musicians.

randomat.org
is my commercially orientated portfolio site, I do freelance Art & Creative Direction, Design & Photography.

earthfaves.com
I'm also Co-Founder & Marketing Director of earthfaves, your favorite places network.

soundcloud.com/randomat/favorites
My favorites in Post-Dubstep and Skweee.

kopf-leuchten.tumblr.com
My favorites in psychedelic music from all over the world.

Artist statement:

As a photographer I'm interested what the medium photography can accomplish. Photography offers a lot of unique characteristics, one of the most basic is to capture light and shadow. I'm not interested in producing any particular meaning or expressing my political view through my work, I just want to capture light and shadow like it's been on earth for billions of years, ironically with state of the art equipment. One thing photography cannot do as well as film is to capture time, that's why I chose this medium for my video work. Impressed and benumbed from the daily information flood I chose to take pictures with a fixed frame, like a extended form of photography. The concentration on one given point, the natural movements of waves, wind, clouds and plants might put the viewer into a state of meditation and preoccupation with oneself when the absence of sound sharpens senses and opens the mind. At the same time we're not used to idleness and standstill anymore, it's irritating and it might make you nervous.

I’m taking a lot of photographs spontaneously but that doesn’t mean I’m taking them unmeant. They are several phenomena I’m interested in and they’re all connected to the appearance of light (on photographs). I know it’s something obvious and basic that could be said about every photograph. But I’m just looking at things like a painter or somebody who likes to draw, I’m watching closely how the reality and the photographic picture looks like. The photographic picture is a medium that transports some links to reality but at some point it’s just a picture consisting of light and shadow caught in an apparatus and printed on paper, it has no depth and limited abilities to transport complex ideas. I’m trying to avoid obvious pictures that you can easily read on the surface. I like mistakes and experiments and I think photography has still a lot of unexplored possibilities artistically and technically and that doesn’t mean there’s a need to find something “new”, it’s more about reconnecting ideas and finding my own voice.