Stephanie Fysh

Stephanie Fysh comes to photography with a PhD-induced penchant for theory and a childhood aversion to cameras. She overcame that aversion when she borrowed a manual camera for a late honeymoon in the irresistibly photogenic New Orleans. Three children and a career or two later, she returned to photography and hasn't looked back – except to see what's hidden there.

Her photographs have been published in Scroope (the journal of the Cambridge University graduate school of architecture) and JPG Magazine, printed and sold as postcards, and used by dance school and symphony orchestra websites. She exhibited her work in the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival in 2006 and 2007, and in an fall 2007 international juried group exhibition in the Tallahassee, Florida, 621 Gallery. Her work currently hangs in private collections across North America, from Toronto right across to Wyoming and down to Georgia. Interviews with Stephanie appear on Utata.org and on poet Sina Queyras's website Lemon Hound: Contemporary Arts & Letters, Interviews & Features.

She currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and children, and supports her photography and her yen for travel by working in the book publishing industry as an editor/proofreader and educator.

Portfolio

Portraits

Photo Journalism

Projects

Landscapes

Stock Photography

Artist's Statement

My photography – architectural vistas and details, cinematic and erotic self-portraiture, and beyond – continues an exploration I began as a literary-historical scholar: an exploration 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 shoot primarily digital images but retain a nostalgia for film and the smells of the darkroom. Although I respect and strive for the skill of control that can capture a final desired image at the shutter's click, I learned in that darkroom that light is not the only material for photography: the image created in bending and capturing that light is also material for transformation. Today I carefully choose when I will let the technological mediation show itself and when I will give in to the ideology of photographic immediacy and hide the process from you.

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.

Favorite Photos (of mine)

Utata Member Page for Stephanie Fysh