The Little Black Gallery presents Short Stories, the latest series by Anja Niemi. The show gathers 140 sheets of peel-apart Polaroids. For 12 months she worked solely with a 1970s Polaroid Press camera. In an effort to work on something that would be slow to make and time-consuming to look at, she produced around 500 Polaroids, and from them edited down and created eight short stories containing fictional characters, objects, landscapes and interiors – all in some way connected to each other.
Previously Niemi created a series based on an object without ever including the actual object. This time she starts off by photographing the content of the Beauty Counselor suitcase – that led to her series Darlene and Me in 2014. Then she created a new portrait of Darlene as the Beauty Counselor. The case filled with beauty samples from 1959 was the start of creating characters and stories based on objects.