Fragments of Intimacy A Photo Series Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Fragments of Intimacy A Photo Series Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Photographs and Layout Design by Kezia Velista
About Kezia Velista is a writer and self-taught photographer born in Jakarta, Indonesia and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She started taking pictures at the age of twelve, and now considers it to be her raison d’être. At twenty years old, she worked as a Studio Intern for Ryan McGinley, one of the most prominent figures in commercial and editorial photography. She currently majors in Writing and Literature at LaGuardia Community College, while working for the marketing department of the institution. At its core, most of her photography is inspired by fictional stories, poetry, music, as well as religious and philosophical texts. “Fragments of Intimacy” is a photo series that stemmed from Professor Sorin Radu Cucu’s Introduction to Literary Studies course, his seminar on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and it has sprouted to be what it is now.
Artist Statement Reading Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse sent me into a longing for retrospection as well as a craving for reconnection with those I have left behind. All of the subjects in this photo series involve people I connected with as a child and young adult in Atlanta as well as work friends I made here in New York City. It was necessary that I returned to Atlanta to take some of these photographs because so much of my roots were there. I placed my friends near rivers and woods in order to allude to the tones and colors I discovered in novel especially during episodes when the characters were not inside the vacation house rented by the Ramsay family. I also chose to have a variety of interior scenes since this is where people typically feel most comfortable and vulnerable. The most intimate conversations in the plot of the novel happen inside the home. I believe this to be the only place that overlooks our imperfections and accepts us as we are. I love taking pictures of people I know personally, because I get to unravel parts of themselves that I might have not known about before. One of my favorite ways of capturing someone is in their least spectacular setting. The banality of life is what makes reality and that is exactly what I wanted to explore through this project. My fixation with taking pictures started at a young age. I found that these little artifacts, these frozen specks of time, could serve as a small footprint alongside people I have met from all walks of life. For me, photographs create a legacy of relationships that could never disappear, no matter how fast time could pass.
“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’” -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
“For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself...�
9
“Yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.�
10
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“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas, even the books that had been given her and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: ‘For her whose wishes must be obeyed’ ... ‘The happier Helen of her days.’”
12
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“But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”
14
“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have — to want and want — how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” 15
“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others...and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.�
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“Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.�
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“It was all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour.�
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“But this one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running down into distant heather. She knew him that way.”
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Subjects Cindy (p 9 and 15) Cindy is a coworker of mine from a restaurant in the Upper West Side. We’ve known each other for years and she’s one of my biggest supporters when it comes to my artistic endeavors. Chase and Liz (p 10) Chase is my friend from Atlanta. They moved to New York shortly after I did and we ended up working together, while Liz is an illustrator from Indiana and also our coworker at the time. My friend Kyle owns this greyish blue shag carpet from Nepal in his Brooklyn apartment and I asked to have a shoot there, to which he obliged. Pim and Younes (p 11) I worked with Pim as a host in the same restaurant in the Upper West Side. She is from Thailand, and I’ve always thought of her as a beautiful woman with great taste in fashion. She eventually got married to a man from Algeria, and Younes came along. Pim lived in this gorgeous apartment in Washington Heights with large floor to ceiling windows and a wide open space. I love the juxtaposition of both adult furniture and child-friendly decorations, because her and her husband have to incorporate both into their lives. The family has since moved to Thailand, but I love that I was once in their apartment to capture this intimate moment of Pim in a natural state of motherhood. Nandi (p 13 and 14) This picture of Nandi was taken in Atlanta during the spring, specifically Roswell Mill. I know Nandi through mutual friends and I’ve always admired her facial symmetry. When I lived in Georgia, I frequented Roswell Mill whenever I needed to recuperate. I loved looking up only to see nothing but trees and the large waterfall, while hearing it snake through the pathway of the river. Chase (p 16) I took this picture of Chase in their apartment. I’m happy to have been able to capture a moment of them looking truly calm and collected. Jamie and Kim (p 17 and 18) I’ve known Jamie and Kim for roughly 10 years through middle and high school. Even though I briefly lost contact with them after I moved to New York, we caught up through social media. Over the summer, I told them about this project and they were incredibly enthused to be a part of it. In September I went to Atlanta again, and the three of us went to Sweetwater Creek on the outskirts of the city to take these photographs. Joe and Jessica (p 21) Joe is an opera singer while Jessica is musical theatre singer, but we know each other from work. I asked to take pictures of them playing with each other’s hands because I thought they would look good together despite not being romantically involved with one another. Friends can share connections of love and endearment without it being sexual or romantic, so that’s what I wanted to depict here. Erik and Ariel (p 22) Erik is the head chef at my workplace and his girlfriend, Ariel is a makeup artist. They share an apartment in the Bronx, with 15 snakes as pets. This photograph, alongside Joe and Jessica’s, clearly emphasize the outlines of limbs and body parts that we use when we try to connect with someone on a physical level, hence matching the quote perfectly. Daniel and Chase (p 19 and back cover) I met Daniel through work, but he’s also from Atlanta so we’ve often bonded over that commonality. He has played a great role in being a subject for some of my most experimental work and I’m grateful for that. This particular image was inspired by another photo series called “Après L’amour” by Ortie. Cindy and Jaime (cover) Jaime is Cindy’s boyfriend, they are both from Colombia but met in New York, and they share an apartment together in Queens with their two cats. Their bedroom has amazing lighting, and that’s where the cover was made.
Lina (intro page) Lina is my roommate and friend. I admire her because we share a love for art and I know I can always bounce my ideas off her and she’ll give me her true insight. I took this picture of her in Prospect Park in early autumn, as the leaves were beginning to change. Olive and Ze (photo below) I met Olive in one of my classes, and I know Ze from my marketing job. They’re both creative people and I thoroughly appreciate their open-mindedness for this photo series. This image was taken at the same hotel that Chase and Daniel’s pictures were created. Special thanks to: -Professor Lucy McNair for supporting my artistic vision and bringing the photo series to life through print publication. -Professor Sorin Radu Cucu for taking part in the process of editing and revising the entire project. -Jessica Stallone for assistance in editing, choice of color palette, and her neverending support.
Citations Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 53. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989.
Quote
Page Number in Novel
“For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself...”
51
“Yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.”
192
“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas, even the books that had been given her and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: ‘For her whose wishes must be obeyed’ ... ‘The happier Helen of her days.’”
27
“But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”
177
“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have — to want and want — how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”
178
“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedgeshaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
62
Quote
Page Number in Novel
“Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.”
192
“It was all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour.”
191
“But this one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running down into distant heather. She knew him that way.”
195