Everything is always so perfect when you are in it

The book  Everything is always so perfect when you are in it brings together several of Anja Conrad’s recent series and emphasizes the common aspects of these highly varied works. These include especially recurring processes, everyday perceptions and actions. The unimportant becomes a singular experience, the insignificant significant. Most of the images are created in an urban environment; they are, however, not street photography but rather images that have been carefully composed.

»Anja Conrad’s exuberant photographs are epiphanies of image making. Her savvy photographic perspective is informed by a profound visual awareness of how the language of popular culture, the ubiquitous displays of commercial pictures in public settings, play with public and private notions of self and identity. Conrad’s fascination with the pictorial smorgasbord discoverable on city streets—a public theatre of imagery—seems to reference the genre of  ‘street photography’. But her smart photographs are high concept, rendering the mechanisms of mass culture’s idealized representations of women to subvert the message.« (Daile Kaplan)

Anja Conrad (b. 1971) was raised in Chicago and New York and currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Since 1992, her works have been exhibited in Germany and abroad at, among others, Ort für Fotografie, Basel, Raum für Kultur at Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main, and the Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.