Saskia’s first photographs, circa 1998:

Saskia Baden (b.1992) was born and raised in western North Carolina. She received her BA in photography from Bard College, and her MFA from UCLA in 2023. Saskia works primarily in large format film photography making portraits, viscous landscapes, and constructed worlds that deal with (in)animacy, eroticism, amphibiousness, and transformation.Saskia also incorporates installation, sculpture, and sensorial elements such as smell and sound into her work in order to engage the viewer’s body. She uses organic materials that are at the end of their widely assumed viability, or supposed expiration, and construct sculptural spaces that bring into question our beliefs about filth, time, and corporeal value. Modes of preservation are important elements of her work, which she exercises through the mechanisms of photography itself, using salt as an elemental preservative that is also at the base of photographic chemistry, and freezing organic material into sculptural forms as a means of material transformation and delaying decay. She loves the ocean, her dog Oyster, and getting emails—so go ahead and send one :) badensaskia@gmail.com