About

Anja Schütz

Bios are stupid and we always pretend to be better and more accomplished than we are. Here’s the truth:

My very first report card in first grade in Germany read: Anja is great at art. She needs to pay attention to everything else. Every single report card during my entire school career read more or less the same. Always gifted at art, always shirking anything that didn’t interest me, no matter the fact that aside from math I easily grasped every subject.

I found my father’s camera in a study cabinet when I was 14, a Nikkormat fitted with a 35mm lens and a 110mm as a bonus. Upstairs was a little booklet about manual photography and I read it and learned it and lived it. The camera case included a roll of black and white film that expired in 1983 (it was 1994 when I found it). The resulting pictures were of my bunny, my childhood friend and neighbor Laura, and probably weird and bad artsy pictures of plants in my mother’s garden. But, I was hooked.

I barely graduated high school years later: I skipped all of my classes, often with my best friend Katie, to be in the darkroom. I’m still thankful to my photography teacher, Lilian Kravitz, for knowing the photography classroom was my safe place. Everything else was overwhelming.

My resulting grades in everything else were so dismal that I went straight to a now-defunct photography trade school, where I learned a solid technical photography education but kicked and screamed my way through anything business-related, which was mostly the point of the school—not to teach us art, but to give us the tools to shoot weddings (I don’t shoot weddings).

Life happens (I’ll tell you in person if you want to know), and after going back to school for graphic design and putting my camera down for 13 years, I came back to it nearly 10 years ago, and it is now what I do. Reaproaching the thing I love has allowed me to be unapologetic in the way I work.
It must be creative, it must involve an active and continual conversation between the two (or group) of us, and there is absolutely no rush. My interest is creating something beautiful with you which is one of a kind. It will be fun, and if I’m lucky we will be friends.