SIYU Personal

Born in Geneva in 1985, the artist of British roots now lives and works in Geneva, where she carries out most of her projects and commissions and teaches at the Vevey School of Photography. Rebecca is herself a graduate of this school as well as of the School of Art and Design of Geneva (HEAD) where she completed her bachelor's degree. Rebecca regularly photographs international literary figures at the Société de Lecture in Geneva, and does portrait work for companies and newspapers such as The Times, The Sunday Times and Le Temps.

Rebecca created iconic images of the 2019 feminist strike, documented the two-year ACCORPS project on women performing in urban spaces, and takes photographs for Foyer Arabelle, a shelter for women facing domestic abuse. In 2023, she received the Enquête photographique genevoise. Her work has been shown at the Centre de la photographie de Genève, the Galerie Focale, and the Journées Photographiques de Bienne. This year, she will exhibit at the Textilmuseum in St. Gallen, Exposition Format in Berne and in a solo show at Artphilein’s Focus Space in Lugano. 

When did you start your photography? I started taking pictures around the age of 10, when I changed from an English-speaking school to a Swiss-french school and found photography to be a wonderful refuge. My first images must’ve been landscapes, but I rapidly started taking portraits, having always been very interested in people in general.

How has your photography developed over the years? I’d say it’s growing to become more conceptual, that maybe today without a text, you might not understand what my project is about. But I think I like that, maybe not all things are said in an image. Today, I like to think that making new work is a way of reviewing the way we look at things and diving into questions about how we keep and love the images we make, hoping to open new discussions around this beautiful medium.

What is your main focuses today? I still really love people and taking their portraits and at the same time I’m continuing my personal work which, funnily enough, seems to be the same themes I was always interested in even back when I was at school, the use of photography in our daily lives, the way we love it, the way we treat it and what happens when we’re not here anymore to talk about the images we made.

What inspires you to create a picture? I can’t really say precisely. But I guess that certain interests I have, somehow lead to other things that seem to naturally click into place and suddenly make sense. They’ll come back to me repeatedly until I’ve finished the work. I think a lot about the project first, really conceptualize it usually over the course of two to three years and then make the work, so I can finally start thinking about other things that will probably lead to new work.

You are also interested in the principle of photography on quilts. What is this all about? After making the project Knowing Thunder I felt the need to understand how women appropriated the domestic space and fell upon the words of Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace: «Drying quilts look like flags hung out by an army as it goes to war». I grew up surrounded by women knitting, stitching and sowing all sorts of things including quilts and found it interesting to revisit this form of expression. I also knew that sometimes women would decorate their homes with cyanotypes of their family photographs. All this combined with several other interests just made sense to start a project in this area of interest. I must admit though that even if I’ve been on it a few years it’s still only the beginning and I hope to continue and finish the project this year. It hasn’t left me alone yet.

You use the cyanotype process with its characteristic blue and collect old black and white photographs. Can you tell us about the process? Cyanotypes being a rather accessible process, it was a widely and easily accessible way of printing and I saw once that women used to make cyanotypes of their family pictures and sow them together to make cushions. That inspired me to bring this method a little further into quilting. The pictures I use for my project are not always black and white. I collect slides (please send me your slides) and like to use those because I make them much bigger than they are, as if they were projected on the surface as they would have been originally. The title And Sometimes through the mirror blue is an excerpt from the poem The Lady of Shallot by the British romantic Lord Alfred Tennyson. It is about a woman enclosed in a tower under a spell, who may only look at the world through a blue mirror, and I thought it was quite interesting to create a link with this project.

Why are you a member of SIYU? Photography being generally a lonely job, I really like being part of a community of photographers, and it allows me to continue making new connections. I had the beautiful opportunity to exhibit with SIYU last September in Lausanne alongside Delphine Schacher, Anouck Ruffieux and Arunà Canevascini. It was a pleasure to meet them as well as organizer Charlotte Aebischer. It’s also nice to know where to look for help if I need it concerning prices for the portraits I make.