"This work deals with layers," Schmidt explains. "It's about looking through something and not being able to totally see it clearly... Women have a lot of different angles and complexities to understand."

Schmidt's photographs, are set along the stretch of U.S. Route 27 that spans from Patchogue to Montauk on New York's Long Island, near where Schmidt currently lives with her family, The series, she says, was motivated by two factors: "One was that me and my family moved out to this incredibly beautiful landscape from Manhattan nine years ago," she says, "and the second was this notion of suburbia and following the utopian American Dream, where you have your house, you have your car and you have your family. It was really a shift in terms of how to see the world through artistic paradigm versus how it really shifts."

This is not the first time the German-born Schmidt, who arrived in America as an immigrant at the age of nine, has explored changes in her own life through projects on identity, belonging and displacement.

© Text excerpt from Photo District News - See more at: http://www.pdnonline.com/features/Bastienne-Schmidts--1996.shtml