Kümei Kirschmann

Santa Fe

Argentyna – Argentina

Kümei Kirschmann is an Argentinian photographer currently based in Argentina who has lived in Berlin and Brno. She has been in touch with photography and art since she was a child but committed to it in 2012. Analogue photography has always been her passion and that lead her to discover alternative processes such as solargraphy, pinhole, and cyanotype.
Even though we are living in a digital world, she has discovered that this experimental and analogue universe has infinite possibilities to work with and has made it her main field of work. She has been working with solargraphies since 2016 and has spread cameras in several cities of Europe and Argentina.

I create solargraphic pictures using pinhole cameras and very long exposure times such as weeks or months. In a frantic world full of snapshots, I believe in “waiting” as a creative power. The resulting images: deformed landscapes that erase the borders of the real and the imaginary, without retouching, only time.
These pinhole selfportraits then turned into solargraphs represent exactly what I felt during lockdown 2020. Everything was still and confusing – even myself – but the only thing that kept passing by was time. In any of those days the sun was always up, spying on me, disguised as rays. Must have been hard for it as well?