Before earning an MFA from Yale University in 2003, Angela Strassheim worked as a forensics
photographer in Miami and New York. It is that experience that helped form the clinical and
detached approach that she continues to use in her post-graduate work which examines her
family and the Midwestern culture in which she was raised.

In the present lot- an image from her Left Behind series- Strassheim photographs her brother and
his son as they prepare for church services. While many other photographers, such as Sally Mann
and Tina Barney, have similarly photographed their own families, Strassheim does so as neither
an insider nor outsider and her subjects look to the camera aware and complicit yet undoubtedly
wary of her presence. As such, the image becomes less about her family and more about the
rituals- of dress, of behavior, of religion – that are surely seen in homes across the country and in
this way Strassheim transforms the personal into the universal.