Kümei Kirschmann
Argentyna – Argentina
Santa Fe
Kümei Kirschmann is an Argentinian photographer currently based in Argentina who has lived in Berlin and Brno. She has been in touch with photography and art since she was a child but committed to it in 2012. Analogue photography has always been her passion and that lead her to discover alternative processes such as pinhole, cyanotype and solargraphy. Even though we are living in a digital world, she has discovered that this experimental and analogue universe has infinite possibilities to work with and has made it her main field of work. She has been working with solargraphies since 2016 and has spread cameras in several cities of Europe and Argentina.
The artist creates solargraphic pictures using pinhole cameras and very long exposure times such as weeks or months. In a frantic world full of snapshots, she believes in „waiting” as a creative power. The resulting images: deformed landscapes that erase the borders of the real and the imaginary, without retouching, only time. But time is also fictitious and factual. It is something that we know it exists but that we can redefine as we please. Time is ungraspable. We know it is there but we cannot hold on to it because it moves. Time is movement. In solargraphies, the time is sketched in the paper disguised as a series of lines, the sun rays. The motion of the sun is registered in this photosensitive support, resulting in a colorful and feeble negative. These negatives are portraits. Unstable portraits of an uncertain time.