Claudia Kunin
Internationally acclaimed for her work addressing the intersection of memory, history, and spirit, Miss Kunin creates 3-D photographic montages. In 2018, her animated daguerreotypes were celebrated by “The Eye of Photography” website and exhibited in a solo exhibition at the home of Daguerre in Bry-sur-Marne.
Ms. Kunin’s work is collected by numerous prestigious institutions including the Museum of Photographic Arts, the George Eastman Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the National Portrait Gallery, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her archive will be housed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History’s Photographic Collection.
Artist’s Statement
3-D Family Ghost Stories is a re-working of photographs taken many years ago by my father. As a child, I remember secretly luxuriating in old dusty family albums made of crumbling black paper. The scintillating mystery of seeing photographs of my parents and sister existence, before the spark of my own life began, galvanized me. The strangeness of seeing myself was simply disembodying. This body of work is an expansion of the ripples in the ocean of time, instigated from the stone cast off by this seminal experience.
As the river of time flows ever faster, I find myself shortening my focus to what is most important in my life. At the roots is my family. Now, with what time I have left, I am bringing back to life those long ago fleeting moments by animating the still photographs in an attempt to prolong and re-awaken the instant, distant past and overlay it with the insight that time and reflection bring.
My father took all our family photographs with a StereoRealist camera. All of my animations are converted to 3-D, using a method of my own devising that enables the viewer to see it clearly both with the 3-D glasses and without.
“Uncanny and gorgeous, a post-humous present”
Philip Littell