Angela Strassheim

An old woman with pink skin and suit, lying in a pink coffin; a family saying Grace in a McDonald's; a little girl in her ballet costume, standing in a windowsill…. This first monograph on the rising photographer, Angela Strassheim, whose work was noted at last year's Whitney Biennial, features a concise selection of recent photographs which center around her born-again Christian family and other domestic narratives inspired by her odd childhood and even more unusual adult life. (Strassheim received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2003, but she is also a certified forensic and biomedical photographer who has worked as a crime-scene and autopsy photographer in Miami, New York and Richmond, Virginia.) As essayist Jean Dykstra writes, Strassheim's photographs are characterized by a steady, unwavering gaze, which can be as unexpectedly intimate as it is unnerving. "They are so carefully observed, and so fantastically inconclusive, that they keep us looking too."