CHRISTINE TURNAUER

Christine Turnauer moved to Paris in 1971 and apprenticed to various photographers. From 1974 to 1976 she was an assistant to Frank Horvat, and then until 1979 she worked as a freelance photographer in Paris.

In 1979, she emigrated to Alberta, in western Canada, where she pursued various photographic projects, the most important one being portraits of traditional dancers of indigenous peoples of North America.   traditional dancers. For this, Christine built a portable daylight studio, in the form of a tent, and traveled for two years from north Alberta to south Montana to attend different “powwows” (gatherings). Her book I Saw More Than I Can Tell (Hatje Cantz, 2020) focused on portraits of North-American Native Indians. In 2021/22, this series was exhibited at the Weltmuseum in Vienna.

Since her return to Europe in 1995, she has traveled to Japan, Romania, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, India, Greece, Turkey, and Mongolia to pursue her photographic work. Her series of black-and-white portraits from these travels and encounters was published under the title Presence (Hatje Cantz, 2014).

In June 2014, she was commissioned to take portraits of the Gypsies in Romania. This was the beginning of a new photographic project on the dignity of the Gypsies, which took her to northwest India where the origins of the Gypsies lie, and then through Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Kosovo. The book The Dignity of the Gypsies was published by Hatje Cantz in Europe in 2017 and DAP Publishing in the United States in 2018.

In 2018, during her exhibition Presence in Arles, she was fortunate to meet some of the Gitanos of Arles. They became friends, which inspired her to make a photographic tribute to her friends Gitanos. The series was exhibited at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation in Arles in 2022.