Studio Visit with Author, Shira Nayman on Friday 16th January 2015

What a pleasure to share and show my work to author, psychologist and general all round powerhouse, Shira Nayman. A wonderful writer (who happens to be Australian also) and author of books such as Awake in the Dark, The Listener and A Mind of Winter. It was a lively yet contemplative visit. Shira wrote to me after the visit and shared some thoughts on my works:

"I've been thinking nonstop and talking about your work...In short I just love it - what you're doing and saying and describing and making us see. I accept your invitation to the world that troubles and astonishes and ultimately awes you."

and

"I'm seeing windows and curtains and light streaming in everywhere, and in new ways, since seeing your work. And thinking a lot about the idea of Home as a place of trauma...where home can mean personal home, country, religion, ethnic group, gender, race, etc... So many striations and unexpected textures and temperatures and colors, and you capture big swaths of this visually, something I think I attempt to wrap my being/soul around in words. Very different, and yet in some ways not so different...

And I realize there's something quite word/narrative/poetic-image like about your work--your photographs are like poems, really. Lyrical and disturbing and celebratory and chock-ful of feeling but also language. Yes, there's silence all over and through them, but there are also stories echoing in those supposedly (but not really) empty spaces. Past lives, ghosts, but also the living-witness-center of each photograph (you...the photographer...the absent eyes that are in fact so present), the maker of/carrier of so many stories, whose own stories see and feel and extract the silent or echoing stories of the people who have inhabited those spaces, the people who suffered and lived and maybe died there. Through bringing your own stories to the space--in fact, I suppose, telling your own story in and through the space of others--you are also giving voice to those hidden, silent people. We hear and feel the echo of their beings in every frame. It's all so rich and at the same time visually compelling beyond."

Thank you Shira Nayman for your thoughtfulness and insights about the works and for the studio visit.  Readers can read more about Shira and her collaborations via an article in the New York Times. In several of her projects Shira Nayman has collaborated with dancers, musicians and others who have interpreted her stories which speak to the complexities and fragilities and strengths of the human mind (and ultimately the human condition) when faced with trauma, oppression and life under extreme conditions. Her works are expansive in their characterization of time, place, memory and how one straddles this as in turn lives it as human existence.

 

Here is also another piece by Shira Nayman about an NPR special on Hannukah. Some information about the piece:

"Moon Landing" by Shira Nayman

As man first reaches the lunar surface, two young girls find an emotional common bond, through the age-old miracles of their vastly differing cultures. Nayman, who also works as a clinical psychologist, is the author of Awake in the Dark, a novella and stories; and The Listener, a novel. She teaches at Columbia University.