‘Starling’ is taken from Haser’s project ‘Stateless’. For the series, Alma has drawn inspiration from the migration of birds to tell a story of freedom and statelessness. The series was first conceived when Alma reflected on her stepfather’s plight to obtain a passport in England. Despite living in the country all his life, he was unable to obtain a passport for years due to an error on his birth certificate. Despite being free, he was somehow in limbo. In ‘Stateless’, Alma conv…

‘Starling’ is taken from Haser’s project ‘Stateless’. For the series, Alma has drawn inspiration from the migration of birds to tell a story of freedom and statelessness. The series was first conceived when Alma reflected on her stepfather’s plight to obtain a passport in England. Despite living in the country all his life, he was unable to obtain a passport for years due to an error on his birth certificate. Despite being free, he was somehow in limbo.

In ‘Stateless’, Alma conveys this story through birds. “Migratory birds are mostly stateless and therefore free. They are the perfect metaphor for freedom and identity”, says Alma.
The pictures were taken in the Wollaton Hall History Museum in Nottingham, which houses an extensive collection of taxidermy. Starlings are small to medium-sized passerine birds in the family Sturnidae. Starlings occur naturally in the Old World, from Europe, Asia and Africa, to northern Australia and the islands of the tropical Pacific.

The stuffed birds reflect an ambiguous status: the viewer doesn’t quite know whether they are dead or alive, but the birds manage to convey a myriad of feelings regardless: dignity, confusion, sadness, resolution. That is the magic of Alma’s ‘look’. These fascinating portraits also seem to play with the classic genre of portraiture from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, leveling human beings with animals. Their small format and the posers ‘dignified’ expressions transport us to a time when having your portrait painted in this fashion was a sign of social success.

For the ‘Stateless’ series, Alma has worked with Rise Art to create an edition of 50 prints. Each print comes with a signed certificate of authenticity by the artist.

Alma Haser is a young photographer, born in 1989 to an English mother and German father, both of them artists. Haser has worked in a wide range of media, including drawing and sculpture, but it's photography that has fascinated her the most and is the medium that she is currently exploring in most …

Alma Haser is a young photographer, born in 1989 to an English mother and German father, both of them artists. Haser has worked in a wide range of media, including drawing and sculpture, but it's photography that has fascinated her the most and is the medium that she is currently exploring in most depth. Alma's current works seem to result from the staging of a narrative whose unfolding is never made clear. Her ‘scenes’ and settings seem to convey an unsolved mystery, hidden behind their apparent everydayness. Her style, in keeping with her mixed provenance, blends the German photographic style –extremely precise and often taxonomic– with the narrative and cinematographic touch of British/American peers like Tom Hunter, Tim Walker, Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. Because of her refusal to tie the images to any particular meaning, Alma's work seems to tackle the universal. The result is a mysterious body of work, the consistency and maturity of which surprises.