This Room
Artist Statement
The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
n my resistance to transition from film to digital photography, I discovered a compromise in a corner of my studio closet. An obsolete professional instant camera replete with bellows for effect and manual F64 aperture for long exposures enabled tactility with film, emulsion and a singular print. This process is itself relegated to the past, uniquely suited to my fascination with investigation of the past and its traces in the present.
In the Spring of 2019 I began photographing myself in long yellow and red rays of seasonal sun near windows and open doorways. I sought light and shadows in passages between rooms of my house and surrounding nature. In a meditative state near room contours where light flooded my body, I counted long estimated exposures to experience and portray the significance of a familiar room or breadth of nature in my encounter with interior emotional and psychological space.
So much of early life is lived in rooms of a house and its natural surroundings. The architecture itself resonates deeply with the relationships, emotions and words spoken in it over time. This space and time is embodied for the venture into the world outside. The spaces of known architecture are integral to sense of self through time, and the flow of life will forever be a rhythm between home and away.
The photograph’s magical facility as witness to time and past reality allows me to see myself continually evolving while staying the same, a ghost of previous selves. In this series I move through new spaces of rooms and surroundings in the visual context and texture of introspection. I recognize, anticipate, and utilize a light beam before it vanishes and learn what I never knew about myself. My intent is that these images set the stage for similar mind and space-time contemplation
"Cindy Konits’ images are of the skin as much as of the eye, of imagination and fantasy as much as the viewer’s sense of reality...These images have an echo and they are heard and touched as much as perceived by the eye. The incapacity of vision activates the other senses; we do not “see” the world, we sense it through our sense of existence. We cannot see the world as we are inside it."
(Juhani Pallasmaa, "TORSOS IN SPACE, LIGHT AND TIME - the Polaroid Images of Cindy Konits)