Culture Nomadic Photo Ark creates time capsule of campus

Jameson Wolf Assistant Culture Editor

Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher travel the country with a full, mobile darkroom coined the Nomadic Photo Ark, capturing and recording individuals’ stories as part of their project “Portrait of US.”

Since July 2021, Frisell and Scher have visited Vermont, New York, Georgia, Colorado, Ohio and Florida. In each location, they invite people to sit for a recorded interview and share pivotal moments in their lives. Frisell then photographs the participants on 8-by-10-inch film with a Kodak Master field camera.

Through a partnership with the Craft Center, the Nomadic Photo Ark spent the beginning of February at NC State, photographing and recording stories of those on campus, culminating in a pop-up exhibit on Friday, Feb. 10 on Centennial Campus.

The exhibit featured 30 portraits of students, staff and Raleigh locals along with quotes from their interviews. Audio recordings of these interviews played in the background as attendees and participants wandered through the portrait displays.

“Being able to leave a set of the prints and stories is really nice, because it ends up being a time capsule of what life was like,” Scher said. “It’s pretty small. It’s only 30 people. But it’s a little bit of an insight of what life was like this week on campus. That’s another part of the project, to create a snapshot of people’s stories right now.”

Frisell and Scher said conversation in combination with the process of analog photography creates authentic connection.

“I just see almost more of a collaboration between me and the person who’s sitting with me,” Frisell said. “Especially after the conversation, it really just allows us to sit together. It’s only like, a minute or two minutes, but it still makes it easier for me to feel good about taking the portrait. … I’ve never been able to capture that same kind of personal focus if I’m shooting digitally.”

The large format of 8-by-10 film allows Frisell to create contact prints where they lay the negative directly on the paper before exposure rather than suspending negatives above the paper with smaller film. This introduces directness and intimacy to the portraits.

“There is that element of the light [that] hits that one negative and then that negative is touching the paper,” Frisell said. “And that’s about as close to that specific moment as you can get physically.”

This intimacy was evident in the final prints. Kate Scheer, a second-year studying mechanical engineering, participated in the exhibit. Though Scheer doesn’t often like photos of herself, she enjoyed Frisell’s final print of her.