ALMA
Alma Haser is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art. Alma creates striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind.
“I’ve got a tattoo around my ankle. It looks like a cracked line, but it’s got two points on the ends. One is my hometown in Germany, where I was born, and the other is in Bradford-on-Avon, where we moved to. It’s time for me to add a new branch to Hastings.”
What led you to photography as a way of expressing your creative ideas?
Alma. I was born in Germany and lived there until I was six. Mum and Dad used to take turns looking after us. My Dad was a painter, and my Mum was a sculptor then. I’d be bossing my brother around, telling him what to do, creating scenes, and dressing up. Then we moved to England, and I started school; at that time, I was speaking English and German mixed together.
Mum took us on a trip around the world when my brother was 12 and I was 13. She had changed course in art; she wasn’t doing sculpture anymore. She was doing pinhole photography and would photograph us a lot. We lived in the Cook Islands for six months. Mum would photograph us using a biscuit tin she had turned into a camera. Then, tape it to the ceiling in our bungalow and get my brother and I to lie on the bed with objects on us like a turtle shell or hibiscus flowers. She’d developed the pictures in the bathroom, and we would watch her develop them. That probably planted the seed for me wanting to take more photos. I already had a Box Brownie and developed them in my mum’s dark room back home. But I think it was that trip that helped me to decide to do photography.
I studied Fine Art Photography at Nottingham Trent University. I spent most of my days in the colour darkroom developing pictures. I’m not happy with the pictures I took back then, but everyone goes through that in their work.
My final degree project is probably closest to where I am today. I was trying to tell stories while using origami within those pictures. Each picture would have a short poem or haiku to go with it. I always liked writing short stories. They felt a little like Gregory Crewdson’s style photograph, very set up and staged with lighting. I don’t necessarily recognise myself in those pictures, except that I enjoyed making the origami.
After university, I went travelling for a bit. I struggled with the idea of making my own work outside of education. Once you’ve left university, you haven’t got a teacher giving you a deadline or a brief. You need to motivate yourself to make work, which I found difficult.
I started with self-portraiture, which helped me have fun with it again; I did a series called Ten Seconds, which was fun to create. I mimicked myself as a kid, playing hide and seek. My Dad would always film us; in one video, I hid under the table in plain sight.
So, the Ten Seconds series was me doing the same thing, but as a 22-year-old. I would film the hiding as well as capture a still. I opened the project and asked people to submit their Ten Seconds videos. It’d be quite a hit if I did it now. But back then, there wasn’t Instagram or other platforms. Surprisingly, I got lots of people doing it from around the world.
I remember going to a show in London where I saw Julie Cockburn’s work. She’d find old portraitures and then embroider on top or cuts them up and rejigs them. It made me wonder about making my portraits with origami on them, and that’s when I started working on my series Cosmic Surgery.
I started photographing friends in the living room of a house I rented in London. I made an origami structure and tied it to my ears, which was uncomfortable because it spiked into my face. So then I discovered that if I print their portrait out, print their faces multiple times and fold them, and finally put the folded origami face onto the portrait and re-photograph it.
That series skyrocketed me into photography. I entered it into loads of competitions. I got into one in Canada called Magenta Awards, and Cosmic Surgery won first place. That gave me the confidence that it was a good project.
I took a photo of two friends; initially, it was taken to be part of Cosmic Surgery. One of the two guys obviously idolised his friend and had the same haircut, a very straight bowl cut. I called it The Ventriloquist because it makes the guy at the front look like a puppet. But in real life, it was the other way around where James, the taller guy, was kind of in the shadow of Luke, who’s a bit more outgoing. That portrait just looked too good. If I covered their faces with origami, it would slightly ruin it. So, I left it as it was and entered the National Portrait Gallery, Taylor Wessing Photography Prize, to see what would happen. I got the fourth prize in the same year as the Magenta Award. Two years after graduation, I started to get noticed as a photographer.
Around the same time, I started working for Nick Ballon, the documentary and portrait photographer, and then a few months later, we got together.
Please walk us through some of your projects and the ideas behind them.
Alma. I made a book of the series Cosmic Surgery with Emily Macaulay from Stanley James Press; she bought one of my Cosmic Surgery pictures, and that’s how we met. We shared an interest in popups and making interactive works. I wanted to add context to the project. Before the book, the series was very lucid, with no real context. I decided the concept was very Black Mirror-esque. A chip would be implanted, and then your face would change to avoid CCTV, or you would be able to choose who you looked like on any particular day. My stepfather is a science writer, Piers Bizony, who wrote the text for the project. We designed it as if it were a brochure for cosmetic surgery. It was so fun to put together. We made the first version, a popup book; only ten copies with many more popups in it because it was handmade.
Then we did a Kickstarter to fund the next version of the book and printed 700 copies and some special editions, which included a recovery kit, tea to help you relax, pills (Tic Tacs) to take the pain away, a cassette tape with ambient music created by Simon Sound, to get you into the right mood for the procedure and some stickers to put over any old portraits of yourself.
I spent three years in London and am not a big city person. So, when we found a place here in St Leonards, we bought it. We didn’t know anyone in Hastings, and I remember my mum worrying that I wouldn’t be able to further my career, which was starting to kick off. But then I got a call from The Photographers’ Gallery print sales team in London a month later, and they started representing my artwork.
That took the Cosmic Surgery work into a different realm, to galleries and fairs, like Unseen in Amsterdam and AIPAD in New York. They encouraged me to develop the Cosmic Surgery series further from two-dimensional portraits. So, I created small origami faces and stuck them to the portraits, showing them in perspex boxes.
My work translates well for music artwork; I have done a few covers for DJ Clark. For his first cover, Clark referenced Cosmic Surgery because he saw it on the cover of Foam Magazine. I didn’t want to recreate Cosmic Surgery. I photographed him just after a tour; he wore a creased, simple grey shirt and looked tired. I noticed his massive hands and asked if we could do something with them. I got him to hold his hand; I already had the image in my head. I printed the portrait and multiples of his hand, which I cut out and built up on the photograph, all coming out of his wrist. It was paper manipulation but on a different scale. Clark’s album covers have allowed me to explore ideas.
I’m dyslexic. The name Cosmic Surgery for example, I was talking about cosmetic surgery to my parents, and I kept saying cosmic surgery, which they pointed out I was saying wrongly. But Cosmic Surgery sounded right for the project.
Then, when I started my series Pseudo while researching for the title, I read the definition of pseudo, and it felt right. I wanted it to be about fake news, like a game Chinese Whispers; as you say something, it changes, and you can’t figure out the truth. But after I’d finished the project and talked about my series, I was pronouncing it Per-side-oh, and again, someone had to correct me.
In Pseudo, I photographed a plant or flower, printed it off, cut holes into it, then got the original plant to come through the holes and rephotographed it again. I’d then create a few more holes and repeat the process. You never know where the first and last picture is when you see the final image. The final image is framed in layers, and you can see through the holes to the back print.
Then came my fascination with ‘twins and puzzles’. I set out to find as many identical twins as possible and photographed them on the same background. They didn’t necessarily have to wear the same clothes; some wore the same top but different colours. It was interesting seeing the twins together because they looked so similar. But when you separated them in a photograph, they almost looked like two different people; the same but very different.
The puzzle pieces represented their genetics and their slight gene differences. I made 2,000-piece puzzles of each identical twin and then swapped every other piece. When I got the first puzzles, they arrived boxed. I had a ton of puzzles to make, and many of them were background colours. I had puzzle parties where I’d invite friends to help me.
I thought, how can I make my artwork more accessible to people who can’t afford it? So, I made boxed jigsaw puzzles that you can make at home. I couldn’t make it the same; it would downgrade the original artwork. I decided to photograph the original and had it made into a smaller 500-piece puzzle. The puzzle lines from the original puzzle are in the image, so it makes for an extremely confusing puzzle.
Many people think that the Twin series is digital or Photoshopped. I get asked that about so much of my work. I was asked about a commission recently; she thought I worked digitally with programming. Until I told her, it was all by hand. I want to be able to move things physically. None of my work is quick. Luckily, people are returning to the physical, ‘crafted-by-hand’ artwork and seeing that it looks different from a digital image (hopefully). Weirdly, many commissions I get are based on technology or pixels, and they seem to like the move back to the analogue.
I released the ‘make-your-own’ Twin Puzzles in 2020, and COVID arrived. Everyone needs a jigsaw puzzle. It was weird timing. It literally kept me going through that year. An Italian TV presenter posted herself doing the puzzle on Instagram, and soon, it felt like I was supplying the whole locked-in population of Italy with puzzles. But Brexit has slowed that down now.
“After my Twins series, I became a Mum, and when Nova arrived, I took some time off. It wasn’t easy to do any work in early motherhood. And then we had our second child, Kiki. She is two now, and I feel like I’m only just back into creating again.”
I am currently working on a project about ‘motherhood and creativity’. I’m photographing mothers and their children and printing the photographs onto fabric. I then cut holes into the prints and get the children and mothers to interact with their images. I’ve exhibited some of the final images with Babes in Arms at Hastings Contemporary. But this series isn’t yet complete, and I’m still working it all out; it’s definitely a work in progress.
My newest project, which is currently untitled, is about German idioms. Sayings like ‘It Is Raining Cats And Dogs’, but German versions translated into English, and they sound ridiculous. So, I’ve worked on two images so far. The first is ‘To Have A Cat’, which translates to ‘Ein Karter Haben’, which means to have a headache or hangover. The word hangover has developed over the years from the word ‘Katarrh’, an inflammation of the mucous membranes. And since the symptoms that appear after drinking too much alcohol are similar to those of ‘Katarrh’, people used to say ‘I Have Katarrh’ or rather ‘Ich Habe Einen Katarrh’. Over time and through Saxon pronunciation, the word ‘Katarrh’ became hangover.
Most recently, I used Jazmine Miles-Long (RyeZine No.8); she is a regular muse of mine. She’s in my diver picture for an album cover. I like going back to her because she’s very easy to photograph, and we’ve got a bond through creative ideas. I told Jazmine that I wanted to use her for my next idiom, ‘To Have Tomatoes On Ones Eyes’, which in German would be said to someone who overlooked something obvious. I photographed Jazmine on the beach with natural light, a sheet of paper with a hole in it, and her head popping out. The sun made her face cast a shadow on the paper, creating a slight illusion after printing the picture. I put tomatoes on it and crushed them with a glass table top.
What is Picnic?
Alma. We’ve had the place for four years, but it took ages to get all the building stuff sorted because it’s Grade II Listed. Once we’d set up the space, Nick said ‘let’s not just use it for our studio, but something photography-led for the community’. He had the idea of a photo book library and to use the space for workshops led by different photographers; aimed at children from underprivileged backgrounds. Workshops would always be free unless you can pay for them. But we needed Arts Council funding for that. We were lucky enough to get the first six workshops funded. We’ve had Maisie Cousins, Annie Collinge, Clarisse D’Arcimoles, Jason Evans, Guy Bolongaro and Eddie Otchere, which was great, but we have much to learn.
The books for the library have all been donated by publishers, photographers and locals. Whenever we get duplicates, we put them in our book swap. We are always open to more book donations.
This year, 2023, we had The Moon Shore, a long weekend of photography in early August, which we’d like to turn into an annual event. The programme included workshops, talks, photography walks, and an exhibition along the seafront; it was a great social event, and it was nice to get the whole photography community together by the sea.
Picnic is evolving; we now have regular window displays showing in progress work from a whole range of different photographers. The library has over 300 books now, and we have regular visitors. We hope to create more events next year, such as photography supper club and mentorships, so watch this space!
Alma Haser
Artist
Picnic
Open on Wed and Sun, 11 am – 5 pm.