Halumni I, 2019 © Dawn Kim — *Halumni I*, 2019 © Dawn Kim

Is there a significance behind using black and white for these images?

In all my work, I want to slow down the reading of a picture — we've become so visually fluent that creating a slow picture is a challenge in itself. I gravitate to black and white because it has the ability to disorient by flattening the frame to hide or bring out details. The pictures in this series were made with three types of cameras, both film and digital, in all types of lighting scenarios, sometimes with strobes and sometimes without. In practical terms, the black and white helps unify the work.

What message are you trying to send through these images, if any? Is there a connection between the subject matter?

I don't have a specific message — I'm tired of looking at art that instructs me what to think. I'm most excited by photographs that offer an invitation to bring my own personal interpretations, and this is the type of work that I want to make. These images are part of a larger, ongoing body of work. There are certain themes I'm thinking of when making and editing this work, such as the various forms that religion (or occult) can take on in church and in family. The idea of faith and how it is passed on through stories and performance.

I read that you see your images like tarot cards. Can you explain what you mean by this?

I mean that all the answers are in the pictures. I was drawing a parallel of my editing process to the ritual of reading tarot cards. I rarely know the specifics or "themes" of the work when I start to photograph, and I turn to the pictures themselves to tell me what my inner self may be gravitating to. Sometimes the reading takes much longer to decipher than I'd like, but it's a method that renews my excitement and helps me continue to make pictures. One of my favorite poets, Claudia Rankine, told me that writing is editing. For the most part, I see images the same way — photography as editing. I use my photographs as soft scenes that can be molded, resequenced and reused to create something else entirely.

Eve, Lost, 2019 © Dawn Kim — *Eve, Lost*, 2019 © Dawn Kim

Describe your creative process in one word.

Wandering.

If you could teach a one-hour class on anything, what would it be?

A seminar on how to be okay with taking a day job for the sake of making your own work. In my experience of teaching undergraduate students, I found there is a skewed narrative of what it means to be an artist, that making a living and making art are mutually exclusive. I'd like to squash that and do a little history class on every "successful" artist and what their non-art day jobs were or are. It'd be titled something like: “The Realities of Being an Artist: It's Okay to Make Money.”

What was the last book you read or film you saw that inspired you?

This is neither a film nor book, but my inner world is currently living with The Sopranos. Visually, the lighting is not so great, and the cinematography is dated (Dutch angle fest), but the editing is incredible. The visual sequence does a lot of the heavy lifting. The scene that sticks out to me as an example of this is in season two when Tony Soprano and his crew make a trip to Italy for the first time. The majority of the episode takes place in the beauty of Naples. In the last 30 seconds of that episode, we're back in the U.S. as the group drives home from the airport. They look out the car window in silence. The scene is a series of close-up shots of each person, observing their hometown with new eyes. The close-ups of their faces are sandwiched by shots of the Jersey cityscape from the freeway, bleak and blurred in passing. The scene is easy to miss and not-at-all crucial to the plot line, but it gets to the heart of what the characters are feeling, which is the most difficult part of storytelling.