Member Spotlight: Vanessa Fischer
Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your photography journey so far.
Greetings. I am Vanessa Fischer, I am an artist from Stony Brook, New York currently living in Brooklyn, New York. I have recently completed my Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography and Integrated Media at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I teach photography in the New York City public school system full time. My photography journey began while studying abroad in Florence, Italy at nineteen years old, where I took my first darkroom class and my life was changed forever. When I returned I took every photography class offered in my undergraduate University. I fell in love with gum bichromate printing, an alternative printing process which mixes water color paint and light sensitive chemistry to make a photograph. In graduate school I began using digital photography to express a series called My Mom’s Gesture. Since completing my MFA I have been craving a supportive space to show and share my very personal projects.
What are you hoping to gain from being a part of Camera of the Month Club?
Camera of the Month Club for almost a year and am so grateful to have found that space I am needing in this club. Photography has been a medium I utilize to process and express what I am learning about myself in the current moment of my life.
Who or what inspires your photography? Share any artists, experiences, or influences that have shaped your creative vision or approach to making images.
From my early days in learning photography, my camera has helped me express and create an artistic practice that reflects my personal journey and exploration of the loss of my mother at fourteen years old, with an emphasis on the impact it has on my life. In my more recent work I have begun to turn my camera onto myself to express living alone for the first time in my life, exploring ideas of taking care of myself, by myself. In that same vein of turning the camera around with myself as the subject, I have also been expressing my romantic life and journey in finding a life partner by creating loosely staged photographic scenes for a non-linear narrative.
Share 5–8 images from a photo series or project that’s meaningful to you. Walk us through the work: What inspired it, what does it mean to you, and what would you like viewers to take away from it?
The images I am sharing are from my series My Mom’s Gesture. This body of work addresses the fragility and discomfort that permeates much of my life due to the premature death of my mother. This loss has left me longing for maternal connection. In this project I photograph mothers of the approximate age my own mom would have been. Through them, I catch glimpses of my mother, within a specific gesture, stance, movement, or performance of a simple household task. There is a comfort I feel while collaborating with the mothers, and for a moment, I am an adopted daughter; I feel the boundaries and securities of a relationship I once knew, as we share intimate memories of our moms. The recreation of the feeling of my mother’s presence, capturing her very essence, allows me to linger a bit longer and to contemplate what was, and what might have been.
