Artist Joy Kardish explores the essence of stillness –the purest and most irreducible quality of the photo-image. Inspired by the enduring prints of early masters like Alfred Stieglitz, Kardish blends painstaking historic photography techniques such as cyanotype, with contemporary media to create works that seem to transcend the flow of time and cut through its ephemeral distractions.
Kardish’s deeply poetic and personal images seem “always to have been” masking the passionate engagement with photographic craft required for their realization. Each work is the product of many hours in the darkroom, teasing out a richness of tone and quality of light that’s only possible with classic photo techniques. Kardish works exclusively with chemistry-based cameras and film. Final images are reproduced on materials selected for character and endurance.
Lives Remembered Series
In this series of photographs, Joy Kardish continues her quest to evoke nostalgia, portray atmosphere and reflect the magic she still experiences watching the image develop once it is married with the choice of paper she uses. For followers of Kardish’s work, they will recognize the fascination she has with the fragmentation of time, memory and the intrinsic beauty of things that reflect the lives of the owners of the objects portrayed in her art.
Her work in this series was completed using 19th century handmade photographic processes (the lith process and platinum palladium), and is complemented by the use of handmade antique papers such as those produced by the kozo plant.
In her own words: “I am inspired by the moments we lost to memory. I love the unexpected quality of working with film, as one never truly knows what will be on the negative until it is developed. I am not interested in revealing reality but in providing a new way to interpret it.”
