Sydney Mieko King – First Light
Words by hannah geddes
I caught up with New Haven-based photographer Sydney Mieko King to discuss her project First Light (Grandma and Hibachan’s Room, July 11-October 3, 2022) No. 1-16.
In 2022, King returned to her late grandmother’s home at a moment of calm, before her family had begun the process of selling the house. It was the first time she had visited since her grandmother’s passing. ‘As we packed the house,’ King recalls, ‘I kept passing by her room, expecting to see her there.’ Her grandmother’s room was empty, but there was the sense that ‘somewhere, within that room, traces of her remained–a hair, a piece of fuzz from a sweater, or a speck of dust.’ Wanting to find a way to connect to her, King turned her grandmother’s room into a camera obscura and left behind a grid of negatives to gather dust in darkness, hoping to ‘capture a relic of her presence.’
King works primarily with a large format view camera, focusing on ‘the mythical processes surrounding photography: how images come into being and how they can become ways to imagine and capture traces of the body.’ Interested in pushing the boundaries of image-making, King often also explores the spaces that emerge in the absence of traditional camera. To make First Light, she blacked out her grandmother’s room with black plastic and boarded up the window to ensure that no light would enter. In complete darkness, she laid out a grid of sixteen 8x10 negatives on a table to gather dust undisturbed. Months later, she returned to expose the negatives using two pinholes she had placed in the window, projecting the view outside onto the film within. King used two apertures to connect the memory of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who had both lived and passed away in that same room. The double aperture enabled her to think ‘about the two of them in that space, together.’
As she explained, First Light is an exploration of ‘memory and residue,’ but experienced as an installation, the group of images reveal the view from outside her grandmother’s window, captured over a number of months. It appears almost dreamlike, the bright blue sky set against the swaying green trees. Trees carry memories, often out-living us to become points of consistency in our ever-changing world. This is the same view her grandmother and great-grandmother would have seen, and through this process of fixing the scene, King creates a connection between the three generations of women. Viewed individually, the images almost appear to be underwater, as if emerging from a dream. With this work, King moves beyond the camera to capture fragments and fleeting moments. What we are seeing in these images are the remnants or residue of what remained in the room. As King explained, ‘the word residue is really important to me in my practice, because it's a word that signals both the absence of something that was once present, but in itself is also matter that physically remains after an absence.’ Using the window as her aperture, the images become ‘primary sources from a place that's very important to [her] and about people that are very important. So in that sense they become a form of evidence or memory-gathering.’
Photography is constantly bound by its myth of ‘truth telling’, a medium that is meant to represent what we can see or want to see. But for King, this work becomes a way to ‘toe the line between representation and abstraction within a medium that is so tied to representation.’ She moves beyond the limitations of representation in her practice, playing with time and space to create her own family archive. As she explained, image-making allows her to ‘stretch the definition of an object, place or a person. It's completely open-ended – a camera is just a box, a light sensitive plane, and an aperture. There’s so much to be found there.’
At first, this work might not appear to be personal or about creating an archive of family, but the more time I spent with King, understanding the work and her process, the more that was revealed. Her projects always have a personal connection, as she needs ‘to have some sort of emotional attachment to the work’ as the images become part of a growing archive that all ‘inform each other in some way.’ Using handmade lenses or no camera at all, part of what draws King to photography is the moment when the image is revealed on the negative and the ‘total lack of control’ that happens just before. As she experiments with the possibilities of image-making, her works become a form of investigation, ‘a new way of thinking about what it means to inhabit or see from a body.’ Through this new way of seeing, she creates a family archive that moves beyond the body, and instead focuses on the traces that are left behind.