Liz Sales

Less Like a Window (2015)

Statement:
Last Christmas my Mom fell through her attic floor, or from my vantage point, her living room ceiling. She landed flat on her feet, which she broke in seventeen places. All the doctors, nurses and visitor remarked on how lucky she was to be alive and for the first time in my life, I contemplated my world without her.

When I returned home to Brooklyn, I started work on new project integrating my home, studio and camera: I transformed my bedroom into a permanent camera obscura. While boarding up my windows, I thought of the “window metaphor” pervasive in people’s thinking about visual perception and photographic seeing. I have never really though of the camera as a window to the world and have always been searching for a more apt description. The longer I live in my camera, the clearer I see it as much less like a window and much more like a womb, a way of being both in and insulted from the world.

Bio:
Liz Sales is an artist, art-writer, and educator. She is an editor at Conveyor Magazine and has published writing in Foam Magazine, Arc Magazine and ISP Magazine. She is a faculty and staff member at the International Center of Photography. Liz lives and works in a camera obscura in Brooklyn,  NY.

Artist’s Website: lizsales.com