Art and Anticrises

Intimacy in Black & White

The spring of my senior year I took a darkroom photography class to fulfill the studio visual arts requirement of my art history major. I chose photography because taking intro to drawing would’ve meant spending several hours every week in front of a sketchbook sounded like a nightmare. Picking up a camera and locking myself up in a lab for hours seemed like a better fit for my poor artistic abilities, plus art historically I’d been interested in photography as a medium for a long time. Senior spring was a stressful, restless and emotional time for me, but somehow in this outlet I found something to hold on to. From going to B&H on a biweekly basis to restock my supplies and spending my Sunday afternoons in the photo lab instead of doing my other homework to screwing up roll after roll and walking around aimlessly trying to find things that seemed interesting, there was something uplifting in having photography as a part of the hectic routine that was my life. Maybe art is the greatest form of hope.

The three paragraphs below were part of a mandatory final assignment that I dreaded completing because I don’t consider myself an artist and, although I love words, writing about my own art instead of the art of others felt weird to me. Putting my ideas on paper comes easy to me, but trying to figure out what the photographs I was taking meant to me and why I seemed to feel drawn to my subjects was a difficult exercise.

I submitted this final version of the statement on May 1st, 2023 but the first draft where I really came up with the idea dates back to April 4th. It’s funny because on April 4th my mind and heart could have never imagined how the words in this assignment would be the core theme of the next few months of my life (and probably most of the rest of 2023). It’s almost as if it was a premonition of how life would force me to face intimacy head on in the weeks and months coming up after it.

I don’t love this text and think it could be a lot more polished. Frankly, I edited it in a rush so I could get all of my other final assignments in on time. But I think there is a special kind of beauty in things that are raw and honest, and this is perhaps the most raw and honest thing I’ve written for other eyes to view in the past four years. The final edits to this were made during my last week of undergrad classes after laying out a semester’s worth of darkroom work on my dining table and all of my kitchen’s counter space at 4:07 AM on a weekday. I think that says a lot.

This Friday night I was sitting in a half-empty bar with a very good friend of mine, drunk on overpriced wine in the West Village, and funny enough what we talked about for hours ties back to what I explored in my photography statement. Perhaps it was the Prosecco buzz amplifying the trust we’ve built through years of friendship, perhaps it was fate manifesting itself in a very honest conversation. I have no way of knowing, but it was one of those exchanges that you didn’t know you needed until they happened. People don’t talk openly about intimacy enough, and I think collectively we don’t acknowledge enough how being vulnerable is such a beautiful but scary thing. If damaged, our relationships with intimacy and our own emotions cause us to hurt others. That’s very intuitive but the thing that I can’t get out of my head the most is how in the long run that damage hurts us the most. When our hearts are on the line and the risk is getting hurt, it makes total sense to do everything that is in our hands to self-preserve. But is it worth it? Our personal relationship to intimacy might just be the most intimate relationship we have in life, one that, for many of us, is constantly evolving and marked more by struggle than by serenity.

My darkroom photographs weren’t the best, but I found in them pieces of me that I had never seen so visibly before. I think that’s gotta count for something.

Yours truly y con mucho amor,

Debbie

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Intimacy runs through my photographs, perhaps in a way that is subtle to everyone but myself. It’s a type of intimacy that one can associate with privacy, closeness, familiarity, and warmth. It’s one that is made up of comfortable silences and implicit understandings. One that is occasionally vulnerable, but never too much.

It’s funny because my relationship with intimacy is a complicated one–I dread it, it triggers me, I run away from it, it scares me. But at the same time, my craving for intimacy is the greatest of all of my desires. It permeates my thoughts and brings me joy, but also drenches me in anxiety and makes me cry. The intimacy that I photograph is one that feels safe and familiar. One that is meditative and introspective, lonely at times. Over the past few months, photography has been my medium to articulate, for myself, that an intimacy that feels safe can exist, wounds and all. Lonely landscapes that force introspection, introspection that forces the type of intimacy that one can only have with oneself. Timid smiles of people that I love, distant silhouettes together that could be us, unknown figures that know more than we do. I photograph caution and safety in a world where I only perceive danger and where trusting feels hard.

My photographs are either of closeness or vastness. Both feel equally intimate to me. With closeness it’s obvious, but there’s something that feels so personal about vastness that draws me to it. Perhaps it’s the realization of being so small in such a wide world, perhaps even more it’s all the thoughts that arise from pondering on that fact. Thoughts that are ours–only ours. So complicated and so private they are only for us to know. For us and for the select few we let in.