The City is a Choreography

Melissa Schriek approaches her work with a deep curiosity and a love for noticing the small, often overlooked details. Her photography celebrates the playfulness of everyday life and the freedom of movement, capturing moments that feel both authentic and unexpected. She describes her work as existing in a space between fiction and reality, where, in staged settings, scenes unfold naturally. With this approach she wants her images to retain a genuine sense of realness, inviting viewers to connect with the stories they unfold.

Body language plays a central role in Schriek’s work. With a background as a dancer, she is deeply attuned to the ways our bodies express emotion and narrative, whether through bold, sweeping movements or subtle, intimate gestures. This sensitivity to movement adds a physicality and versatility to her images, which often feel as though they are in motion with energy and spontaneity.

The City is a Choreography was photographed between 2017 and 2020 in various cities around the world. The project considers ways to interact meaningfully with our daily environment and with the strangers we pass by, encouraging viewers to notice the connection between individuals and the space they inhabit.

Schriek has always been interested in the city and how we relate to it. She explains that she easily gets bored with her surroundings. She tries to never take the same route twice and to think of ways to make our surroundings seem a bit more interesting by giving attention to a specific object. This could be the sidewalk, a traffic cone or a broken-down bicycle. All of them seem trivial and significant at the same time. The entire city is composed of these objects and strangers that surround us. Out of a desire to step out of her everyday life, Schriek explores ways to experience the urban environment visually and physically.

The City is a Choreography started with research, involving small performances by Schriek herself, where she would lie down over a pole or in the middle of a busy street to experience the relationship between the body and the street. For the first shooting she worked with a dancer, encouraging her to “dance with a bike” or to “wrap her body around a pole as far as she could”. Seeing a dancer intuitively interact with the environment allowed Schriek to get a better idea of how to proceed and develop the project. For this specific series of images Schriek worked together with models, sometimes positioning them with a specific idea in mind and other times letting them intuitively connect with the surroundings. She describes it as photographing a dance.

The people in front of the camera are moving and so is Schriek. She sees the city itself as a place of constant movement, which we individually become part of once we go out onto the street. With a focus on its sculptural qualities, the human body becomes central in her images. By composing the body together with objects and strangers, the images explore how we can experience the constant movement surrounding us and maybe even how to become one with it. The work raises the questions: Can we transform the way we interact with the ordinary? Can we uncover a feeling of significance? Maybe we are not just observers, not passive city dwellers, but participants in a street scene.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Melissa Schriek is a Dutch photographer who lives in Amsterdam. Her work explores the border between staged and documentary photography, focusing on how one relates to others and to the environment. Melissa has worked internationally for a variety of clients, with a special interest in the fashion and magazine world. Clients include Canon, Die Zeit, The New York Times, Adidas, Nike, Dr Martens and Balagan Studio. Schriek’s series “The City is a Choreography” has also been published as a book (sold out).

For more information please visit:

Website: https://www.melissaschriek.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissaschriek/