The second time that Sophie photographed Hannah and me was at our childhood home. The day began in our shared closet, trying on our old clothing that had been abandoned but never donated. I settled on the sweatshirt that had once been worn by my dad in the summers; Hannah found pants from her teenage years. Wearing retired clothing – feeling the weight of aged cotton and the smell of accumulated dust – can take you back decades.
We moved to the backyard and found a place to be photographed next to two trees that hung a makeshift zipline. The zipline is now frayed, but we recalled afternoons spent there many years prior, recklessly riding until we got too old and too heavy to enjoy it. As we shared our recollections, Sophie slowly unpacked their 4x5 view camera (one of the earliest camera models, developed in the 1840s). They unscrewed the camera knobs, fixed the lens onto the front, and mounted it to the tripod. Then they metered the light, adjusted the aperture, and set the shutter. Carefully, Sophie guided us in finding our positions and gaze as they moved in and out from under a dark cloth, a cloak that allows the camera operator to see the image on the glass – upside down and backwards. And then they released the shutter.
I remembered all of this when Sophie shared the title of the show with me: Into the Middle of Things. One of the pursuits of this project is middle-ness, capturing fleeting moments of realization and orchestrating a choreography of memory. Ours is an image that we arrived at when Hannah and I revisited a place that we shared, physically and emotionally. Sophie steered us there intentionally. Their quiet affirmation provides space for discovery and safety; their durational process and attention to mechanics offers time to find resonant visual language. For Sophie, co-constructing a frame (with friends like me, family, partners, artists, students, and even people they met on the internet) is foundational to the work itself.
When using a view camera, a photographer cannot see the image at the exact moment when it is captured. This means that when the image of Hannah and me was made, Sophie stood a few feet from us, watching us in space, and not through a lens. This situates Sophie in a middle ground, quite literally, between maker and participant. Their evocative photographs are born from approximation; and an almost spiritual alignment between process, light, and people. There is inherent – and exciting – uncertainty.
In her book, Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes queer beauty as disorientation within the familiar, an uncanny state when “what is passed over in the veil of familiarity becomes rather strange.” Sophie’s photographs capture this precise strangeness – awkward moments that are at once highly idiosyncratic, but also reveal a common experience. Queer kids in a lake mid-chicken fight. Lesbian sex. The recovery period post nose job. The worlds of these pictures are deliberately personal to the subjects – but as viewers, they are ours to imagine. How did we get here? Where did they begin?
Where do we end?
-Rebecca Celli, 2024
Camera Club Projects | 17 Allen Street, New York, NY | September 12 – October 19, 2024