Laura Benedetti Klein grew up in East Africa, surrounded by breathtaking landscapes in the 70s.
There were no art museums nor photography galleries at that time. Open-air cinema (drive-in), documentaries on wildlife, the wilderness in parks, were her first ‘eye-opening experiences’.
Laura learned to see by observing the soil, plants, trees, wild animals, plumage of birdlife, changing through dry and wet seasons. The extraordinary diversity of the people populating the capital where she lived encouraged her curiousity.
She has a preference for colour photography. Stemming from her African days.
A self-taught photographer, Laura acquired a 6x6 medium format Rollei camera in the late 90’s, then a second-hand Hasselblad in 2005.
Laura edits personally her photographs then these are digitized by a professional.
When her parents moved to Switzerland for professional reasons in the early 1980s, modern art were subjects Laura Benedetti Klein was drawn to, thanks to enthousiastic professors in public schools. High quality art exhibitions in Geneva, Lausanne, Pully, Martigny, Bern, Basel and Zurich in museums and galleries nurtured her soul. Regular cinema festivals at her high school in Geneva showing italian, japanese, american and french independent film makers taught her to frame.
Encounters with contemporary artists in the 90’s and photographers in mid 2000s nourished her interest to pursue photography, while working part-time and bringing up her daughter.
Edward Weston, American photographer, prepared a statement for an exhibit of his in New York city in 1932.
”In a civilization severed from its roots in the soil, cluttered with non-essentials, blinded by abortive desires, the camera can be a way of self-development, a means to rediscover and identify oneself with all manifestation of basic form, with nature, with source.”
Laura was severed from her roots in East Africa at the age of 12 years old and her family settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where she learned to speak French. She had difficulty adapting to a northern European culture in a technical-driven country. Art was a language she could understand. Drawn naturally to organic forms that reminded her of nature in her childhood, may be one of the reasons why one of her most accomplished photography project was a self-commissioned one to photograph the monumental sculpture by Henry Moore, Reclining Figure Arch Leg, 1969-70. The work was discovered by Laura in front of the Musée d’art et d’histoire, MAH, in Geneva’s old town. From 2011 to 2013, she photographed the sculptures from the same moulds, who are all slightly different in San Diego, Hakone, Lisbon, Tehran and Seoul.
A book published by Luca Notari was printed in 2022.
https://catalogue.henry-moore.org/objects/17807/reclining-figure-arch-leg.
https://www.mahmah.ch/collection/oeuvres/reclining-figure-arch-leg/1974-0015