Born in 1947 in Zug, Annelies Strba has practiced photography since the young age of fifteen. Known for photographing her close circle of friends and family, she mounts her first show in 1990 at Zurich’s Kunsthalle and thus inaugurates her artistic career at forty-three. 
In the past few years, her photographs have featured a dreamlike world whose protagonists seem almost like elves straight out of some fairytale. As if to resist a certain violence that is conveyed by the media, Strba works the image with the firm resolve to show harmony in everything, creating an imaginary parallel universe. Her artificial, carefully constructed images tell us of a fantastic world that is similar to dreams whilst taking reality as their setting. “When I shoot videos in New York or in farmers’ homes, I’d like to show that it’s all one thing.” To bring this off, she makes use of computer tools and reworks her digital shots and video stills, which are generally printed on canvas. She herself admits she wants to work “like a painter” and wields Photoshop as if it were the artist’s brush of an earlier age. 
Strba’s work is represented in many collections and has been the subject of solo shows at Zug’s Kunsthaus, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tate Gallery of Liverpool, Paris’s Maison européenne de la photographie and, in 2003, the Helmhaus in Zurich.