Anke Stäcker’s photographic work creates narratives about her personal history from two continents.
Anke Stäcker was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1947 and migrated to Australia in 1988, first living in Melbourne and then moving to Sydney, where she now lives and works.
Stäcker uses urban streets and places, in recent years mainly from Australian cities, as a platform to translate her observations into subjective and emotionally charged stories.
In her urban photography she seeks out what she calls ‘zones of uncertainty’, derelict industrial or residential sites, wastelands, back lanes and deserted streets at night to interact with and overlay with her own perceptions.
She says, “I consider such places as uncertain because they are transient. They are not what they were before and not yet what they may become. This connects them to my perception of childhood, which is a time of transition and uncertainty, especially when you are born in post-war Germany. But I think uncertainty can be a good thing. It raises questions and offers opportunities for visions and imagination. There is an inherent freedom.”
At the beginning of 2020 Stäcker started a journal about the investigation of streets with female names in Sydney. This project aims to find interest in the everyday and to discover hidden histories. It includes photography and writing about the observations and impressions experienced in the various locations. This coincided with the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic. See the blog Random Discoveries on this website. Part of this work was shown in a solo exhibition at Articulate project space in April 2021.
Previously Stäcker’s practice has turned for a while to the construction of dioramas with dolls, toys, found or fabricated objects and bits of nature which she then photographed. She regards these scenes as miniature film sets where the dolls play out a particular narrative, based on Stäcker’s personal history and preoccupations.
She has used this method for her investigations about childhood memories in post-war Hamburg to re-enact and reinvent experiences and impressions from that time.
Anke has a particular interest in collaborating with artist-run spaces with experimental and innovative agendas and is on the Board of Sydney’s Articulate project space. She has been a finalist in various prestigious Australian award exhibitions, including the Helen Lempriere Travelling Award, the inaugural ‘Sydney Looking Forward’ exhibition in Hyde Park, Sydney, now renamed ‘Australian Life’, the Alice Prize from the Alice Springs Art Foundation, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award. Stäcker obtained a Master of Visual Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2000.