Woman With Rooms

By Stephanie Fysh

One day last December,
as I was walking through my living room, the walls around me and the floor under my feet and the ceiling above my head and all the furnishings began to fade, became insubstantial and very nearly disappeared. I had to use a doorframe to hold myself up -- and to show myself that this was an illusion: that the walls and floor and ceiling and furnishings that defined that room, that held me in, were actually still there. That moment eventually developed into the photo series Rooms With Woman.

The first time
I was asked to write about what lay behind my photographs, I declined. I couldn’t do it, though I wasn’t sure why. Later, watching myself, I realized there were times between me and the camera when there was no conscious thought, nothing in the shape of language. More recently, when I was asked to write about the creation of a project -- this project -- I was able to say yes…with a caveat. I would write about it, but I could never explain everything. So here you have some of the story of Rooms With Woman, the first project I ever shot that was conceived as a specific whole.

It didn’t start
as a series. It started as one image, sitting in my head, waiting for the exam-marking and Christmas baking to be done; one image that would somehow communicate that strange experience. That moment, to me, had been about how our life circumstances are more fluid than they usually feel to us, and about how our selves are formed by the things that surround us.

I suppose that was too much to ask one photograph to do, even if the moment really had lasted only a moment. And it was a good thing there was a lot of Christmas baking to do, because one night during the holidays, in another moment, I was startled awake by the knowledge that I had to make not one but a series of photographs, and a fairly large series at that. Together, those photographs could stand a chance of telling what I needed to tell -- to escape all the other interpretations that might be given to any single photograph.

This is my first lesson about projects: sometimes you can tell what you need to tell in a single image, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you have no choice but to conceive a series.

It’s a good thing
I had been awakened with such clarity of vision, or I might have backed down from shooting a series. I had given myself projects before, but those consisted of several photographs of the same place. This would be different.

In the first place, a series was something done by artists; I was an amateur, and a recent one at that. What business did I have creating a large, planned series? Just who did I think I was?

Second, to function as a true series, not just a collection of photographs, these images would have to share a single, strong aesthetic. For the sake of continuity, I would have to clearly define that aesthetic before I began shooting and carefully maintain it over the length of time it would take to create the series.

When I first started
to actually plan the series, I didn’t write anything down. Instead, in my head, I kept listed all the many elements that would make up the series. The rooms would be familiar rooms, rooms common to all homes, stripped of my personal life. The “scenes” would involve touching and not touching, and would violate the rules of a room. The lens length and aperture choices would allow a full view of the room in question. The point of view would be unchanging. The images would be black and white to decrease distracting information. The tonality would involve the full Ansel Adams-esque range, for its classical feel. The costuming would be generic women’s clothing or the pure unclothed body. I would be the model in the scenes, though they wouldn’t portray my life or my self.

Because none of this was written down, some of those elements changed over time. Rooms were added and dropped, attitudes eliminated from the options, all women were combined into one Everywoman (in one image “woman” is signified by clothing alone).

And "over time" got longer too. What I had believed might be four total days of work turned into many more. There were five half-days of shooting -- days that included severely cleaning a room, arranging my own body and dress, shooting several frames, examining them, re-shooting some, then returning the room to normal. Post-processing took five to six full days, grabbed an hour at a time here and there, spread out over five months.

This was my second lesson about photo series: 24 photographs in a series is much more work than 24 individual photographs, even before you begin.

Shooting changed
more things. I started to keep written lists, and I now had visual references and EXIF data to refer to as well. I was particularly grateful for these references the times I had to reshoot the same room on a different day. Sometimes I would sketch out room options, then throw the sketches in the recycling bin.

Shooting also changed how I thought about the project. I needed it to be seen -- I am unable to create photographs only for myself -- and the only way I had to do that was on Flickr. But image presentation on Flickr is sequential: you can’t walk into a room and see all the images at once. And sequential presentation implies narrative. For me, now, that meant creating list after list of the images I chose to include, in different orders, trying to break any possible narrative.

There would be a set view, of course, but even that is complicated on Flickr: all the nudes in the series (more than a third of the whole) are “private” images; only 199 people can view the full series as I conceived it. Even then, they are not viewing it in the way I might hang it, if I could.

There’s my third lesson about series projects: their presentation requires as much thought as their creation.

I don’t want you to think
I’m trying to dissuade you from this kind of project.

Yes, it requires thinking before you shoot, and it requires that you -- not your camera -- control your camera settings, no matter what the subject is you are shooting, and it requires that you control your processing the same way, whether you shoot film or digitally. But if you have to shoot in series manner, in an aesthetic whole (and like me, you just might find that you do), the lessons you learn in doing so will change the parameters -- the walls and floors and ceilings and furnishings -- of all your photography. It will change who you are as a photographer. You can, with me, choose to step through that door. Even if you need a doorframe to hold you up on the way.

Editorial note: The complete Rooms with Woman set may be viewed here.