Stephanie Fysh

Stephanie Fysh comes to photography with a childhood aversion to cameras and a PhD-induced penchant for aesthetic theory: her photography training—at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, and in a variety of workshop settings—came after years immersed in eighteenth-century literary culture and its material conditions.

She has exhibited as part of the Gladstone Hotel’s “Urban Optics” in the 2006 CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival , and in the Gladstone’s juried show “PHOTO Fiction” in CONTACT 2007. Her work is held in private collections across North America. She has been published in Scroope (the journal of the Cambridge University graduate school of architecture), in JPG Magazine, and on fine-art-quality local postcards by Toronto’s Ballenford Books on Architecture. Interviews with Stephanie appear on the photography website Utata and at poet Sina Queyras's Lemon Hound: Contemporary Arts & Letters, Interviews & Features.

She currently lives in downtown Toronto, where she works in the book publishing industry as a freelance editor/proofreader, publishing educator, and director of the Book and Periodical Council.

Statement

My photography—architectural vistas and details, cinematic and erotic portraiture, and beyond— continues an exploration I began as a literary-historical scholar: of the relationship between the physical structures we build, the culture we weave, and the selves we construct within those physical and cultural spaces. At times this exploration masks itself in the entirely fictive but still recognizably photographic; at others it takes on the cloak of the documentary.

I currently create primarily digital images but retain a degree of nostalgia for film and the smells of the darkroom. I learned in that darkroom that light is not the only material for photography: the image created in bending and capturing that light is itself material for transformation. Today I carefully choose when I will let the inevitability of technological mediation show itself and when I will give in to the ideology of photographic immediacy.

In tracing, bending to shape, and making material envisioned moments of sublimity, both large-scale and intimate, intended and unintended, I seek to illuminate the equivalent possibilities of the conscious construction of self—of a personal sublime—and of an erotics of the built world. Or at least to make you look up.

To see more of Stephanie's work visit www.stephaniefysh.com