Denise sought out the classical ideals of photography. At first she made use of simpler cameras in order to be able to record her impressions rapidly. Later she experimented with large-format cameras and cut film of various sizes. In her work for magazines and other publications colour photography became dominant while in her exhibitions she favoured black and white material.
It is characteristic of Denise Grünstein that she has frequently sought her images beyond the confines of Sweden. For the exhibition “Zone V”, which was part of the Archipelago project in 1998 in connection with Stockholm being Cultural Capital of Europe, she travelled round Eastern Europe to find what she was looking for. In her exhibition “Jaisana,” 1999 she had made numerous exposures in a village in India. A remarkable aspect of that project was the fact that she used glass negatives that had passed their use-by date. This meant that the sensitivity of the negative material was not specifiable and that a negative might be more or less light-sensitive in different parts. Denise Grünstein also worked with the relationship between focused and unfocused, thereby creating a particular tension in the pictures.
In her latest project “Figure in a Landscape” Denise has changed materials. Here she uses negative colour film and colour paper for the finished photograph. Her instrument is an 8″ x 10″ large-format camera fitted with a panorama back. She has travelled with this large camera in the United Kingdom and on the Continent. She uses nature as her stage; a symbol of romantic ideals. But all is not harmony in the landscape: the viewer can sense an underlying threat though this never appears explicitly.
Curator: Leif Wigh
