Clare Strand is an artist whose practice is formed by photography and the changing status of photographs and images in contemporary society. Her works, mainly using photography but also in other mediums including installation and even painting, question the role of the image in our understanding of ourselves and how technology has transformed the contemporary idea of how images are made. In her biography, C. Strand, who has an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art in London, discusses this medium-specific formation as she refers to herself as an “artist who works with, but mostly against [it]”. Thus, across her oeuvre, C. Strand challenges, references, builds on and expands the history of photography with a distinctly contemporary and feminist position.

C. Strand’s work interposes photography with a material approach. In Snake (2017) she uses found photographs of women and girls holding snakes (or looking at them fondly) and prints lines of poetry on the images, making a surprisingly tender collection. In her 2023 exhibition, The Colder the Weather the Warmer the Hearts at NŌUA Gallery in Bodø, Norway, C. Strand drew on imagery from the archives in Nordland, which she then printed onto garments, reintroducing the local history into the community by staging a fashion show where local women wore the garments. In Men Only Tower (2017) a sculpture is made of a glass box on a plinth that houses 68 issues of the British magazine Men Only, which shamelessly states that it does not need and does not have any women readers. Packaging this history into matter, Men Only Tower isn’t a photograph in itself, but in an act of subversion the artist has placed her own images into the centrefolds of each magazine, sealed inside black envelopes.

The expansive idea of what photography is that C. Strand offers in these works is matched by an ambitious thinking of what it could be. C. Strand is interested in commenting on the circulation and distribution of images. In the artist’s book Negatives… for Fun with Clare Strand’s Photography (Multipress, 2019), she made her own personal photographs available to readers as negatives, so they could print them.

The Discrete Channel with Noise (2018), earned her nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2020, with the work shown at the Photographers Gallery in London that year. For this piece C. Strand, while on a residency in Paris, painted existing photographs that her husband described to her over the phone by breaking the image down to a grid and describing the grayscale of each square, and on the other end of the line, C. Strand translated this description to large-scale acrylic on paper, like a human fax machine. The fact that the resulting paintings are black-and-white grids that look like pixels is not a surprise. Her work is anything but traditional and fills the viewer with a sense that images are duplicitous, always-changing things. That photographs are not stable and that meaning shifts. That is: a sense that the world is not exactly what it seems or how it is represented.

C. Strand’s interest in expanding what photography is and means has led to her work being featured in photography books and magazines worldwide, as well as in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the United Kingdom , the Pompidou Collection Paris, MoMa NYC and private collections.