Hama Gallery is presenting the work of photographer Melissa Schriek at Paris Photo 2025, featuring an artist whose journey began with a simple disposable camera during a childhood school trip. Schriek traces her fascination with photography back to that elementary school outing, when her father gave her a disposable camera that sparked what would become a lifelong passion. She spent the entire day carefully composing her shots, directing her classmates in front of thoughtfully chosen backgrounds.

Recognizing his daughter's growing interest, Schriek's father later gifted her a small compact digital camera to encourage her continued exploration of photography. Throughout most of her school years, photography served more as a means of creating memories rather than making art. During this formative period, the act of taking photographs held more significance for her than the final results themselves.

Schriek's artistic approach underwent a dramatic transformation when she entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. Instead of simply representing reality, she became interested in discovering a world that exists between truth and fiction. She began intensively exploring the relationship between the sculptural nature of bodies and their surrounding environments, drawing inspiration from the body consciousness she had developed through her dance and gymnastics classes to reimagine her perspective on movement and form.

For her graduation project, Schriek draped bodies in various poses throughout the city to examine how human forms interact with different spaces. This experimental work laid the foundation for her current focus on the performative staging of her models, primarily in public spaces. She deliberately chooses to work with individuals who actively seek to explore the limits of the body and its capacity to communicate through gesture.

Despite the dreamlike and surreal quality that characterizes her work, Schriek maintains that the heart of her art lies in human stories, insisting that her photographs must always resemble plausible scenarios. Her latest series, created in Japan, reflects her ongoing fascination with the expressive potential of the female form. By capturing moments of liberation and emancipation, she challenges cultural norms and perceptions while offering women a platform in front of her lens to foster a sense of autonomy and personal expression in public spaces.

Schriek's creative process involves juggling multiple projects simultaneously, intuitively abandoning those that become uninteresting or seem better suited for another time. Her residency at Hama Gallery has allowed her to explore the fusion of photography and painting, adding layers of texture and meaning to her images. "Painting on my images has become very interesting. I can really try to understand the images again and tell the story," she explains.

Much of Schriek's inspiration derives from everyday life – observing how people walk, dress, move, and interact with one another. "I can find very mundane objects interesting and focus intensely on them," she notes. Her work invites viewers to question the boundaries between photography and painting and the subjective nature of perception, encouraging them to reconsider the importance of the apparently ordinary.

The artist's deep connection to female relationships profoundly influences her work. "I have always been inspired by the women around me. I consider female friendship and solidarity as something unique. It's very difficult to explain, and that's why I try to photograph it," Schriek reflects. Her artistic direction primarily focuses on exploring how individuals, particularly women, interact with their environment, with themselves, and with others, remaining faithful to her commitment to depicting the complexity of the female experience. As she puts it: "I still mainly photograph women for my personal work. It continues to fascinate me."