Research. The Constructed Image.

Alma Haser.

Alma Haser was born in 1989 into an artistic family in the Black Forest, Germany. She is now based in London and on the southeast coast.

She is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art.

She is an extremely interesting photographer.

She creates striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind.

She expands the dimensions of traditional portrait photography, and she takes photographs further by using inventive paper-folding techniques, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue around her subjects, manipulating her portraits into futuristic paper sculptures and blurring the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery. She received her first camera when she was six years old and would take photographs of her and herd dolls before she retired the camera in favor of drawing. It was an “around the world” trip with her family when she was 13 years old that inspired her to revisit her former passion.

One of her projects, named “Cosmic Surgery” was made by photographing the subject, then printing multiple copies of the sitter’s face and folding them into origami structures. That, is then placed over the original face and the whole construct is photographed again.

She mainly decides to choose friends to sit for her, and preferably uses ones with distinguishing features and a unique sense of style. She wants the photographs that she creates to “unsettle” the viewer. The pastel colours used in her images also begin to unsettle due to there being a weird aspect to the images always, such as their faces and this in juxtapoisition with the actual image is both playful but also extremely creepy.

“I hope that people find them beautiful but at the same time are taken aback because they are so awkward and weird” “I think they do freak people out slightly, but I like that. I just want them to look closer.”

She also has other portrait projects, such as “The Eureka Effect”, “Twins” and “The Ventriloquist”

The Eureka Effect is a signature body of work, expanding the dimensions of traditional portrait photography and, yet again, she takes her photographs further by cutting and manipulating them, merging them with leaves and flowers to create works that are to catch the eye of the viewer, which is something that she tried to create in this project too.

Twins was created as Alma Haser has stated that twins have always fascinated her and their closeness in looks and attributes. The two in her images are not twins as they did not even know one another before the photo-shoot but they replicate one another very well.

Twins: