Andi Schreiber: Wonderlust

Andi Schreiber: Wonderlust by Aline SmithsonApril 27, 2012

Andi Schreiber is what one might coin as a domestic Martin Parr. She turns her camera on her life, her children, family and friends with a glaring lens that is full of color, reality, and the details of our humanness. There is humor and pathos in her seeing, and her skills as a photojournalist bring domestic life into sharp focus.

Andi graduated from the University of Michigan with a BFA and was a photojournalist in Boston Before moving New York City to work as a magazine and newspaper picture editor. In 2002, she traded in city life for suburbia and lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband and sons. Recently Andi’s work was featured in the Kiernan Gallery’s exhibition, Family Dynamics, and she was an award recipient in PHOTO/arts Magazine’s book and online exhibition, My Own Wilderness.

In 2010 and 2011, Andi’s books Lush Light and WonderLust were each awarded Honorable Mention in Blurb’s Photography Book Now competition.

WonderLust is a visceral response to my immediate surroundings – a world where I’m at home yet hovering on the periphery, an insider and outsider at once. Through these images I find my place within my family’s framework and that of a larger existence.

A sense of wonder and thrill of attraction is at the core of this project. These photographs are made at home, at poolside, at parties and in parking lots, of family and friends, and people unknown to me. They are pieces of my world and a manifestation of inner life. I fight the urge to pre-visualize; my process is random. I’m struck by the accidental image: a flash of color, a passing gesture. Details make me tingle. I need to experience deeply what is here, right now. The camera enables me to vanish into moments before they are gone.

This ongoing body of work, WonderLust, embraces sensation and a passion for what’s unseen. It’s as if I have no choice but to turn that irresistible desire into something tangible, into a photograph. I want to seduce the viewer to feel as I do – to know pleasure, to be alive.