Featured Photographer: Cindy Konits - “This Room Will Survive Me”
“Mia Vida”
There’s a particular hour of the afternoon when a room stops behaving like background and starts behaving like an invitation. Light slips in at a slant, hitting the wall just above the baseboard, crawling across the floor, grazing the edge of a doorway. If you cross the threshold into the room you will no longer be looking at the light because you now embody it and your gaze is turned inward. Cindy Konits has spent the last several years inside that hour, turning light and emulsion into a field laboratory where architecture, memory, and metaphysics coalesce, not as abstractions, but as daily, repeatable phenomena traced in light and emulsion. Her new monograph, This Room Will Survive Me, forthcoming from Schilt Publishing and debuting at the 40th Anniversary FotoFest Biennial in 2026, is the record of that sustained experiment, a sequence of sixty instant photographs edited down from hundreds, bound in Japanese binding and designed as an art object, to be moved viewed at roughly the same tempo in which the work was made, slowly, attentively, one measured interval of time at a time.
“It’s a discovery about the existential experience that architecture is. Architecture is not the buildings out there; it’s the mediation between my mind and the world.”
“The Window”
“No”
This Room Will Survive Me began not as a book, but unwittingly as an investigation into the analytic room she engaged in frequently and consistently over a long period of time in a psychoanalysis recently ended. In 2019, in the back of her studio, she found the tool that allowed her to visually suggest what we all experience in the movement through space that we are unaware of, without deliberate reflection. A now-obsolete Fuji Professional instant camera whose bellows and tiny f/64 aperture, paired with expired Fuji FP-100C film and an ND filter, would lead to continued introspection and existential photographic practice.
Equipped with the last batches of the peel-apart color stock ever made (Fujifilm officially announced the discontinuation of FP-100C instant peel-apart film on February 29, 2016), her camera demanded long, “guesstimated” exposures of fifteen to thirty seconds, sometimes up to a minute. She would open the shutter, step into “long yellow and red rays of seasonal sun near windows and open doorways,” and let the light write her, slowly, into the contours of doorframes, chair backs, and walls. The peel-apart process introduced its own layer of chance. A wet residue left on the negative could be pressed back onto the print to create a second, ghosted impression, so that even the final image became a composite of emulsion, error, and touch.
“The End”
“It’s simple. You ask, ‘How am I feeling in this space?’ Be more aware of how different rooms make you feel, behave, and relate to others differently.”
The resulting self-portraits feel less like scenes observed and more like the amalgam of places and selves all on the same plane. In “The Window,” the bedroom’s toile wallpaper, with tiny pastoral churches, trees, and strolling figures, bleeds into a composited print of forest pines. Konits’ translucent body becomes both patterned fabric and forest air, her white dress the hinge between interior and exterior. Window mullions, tree trunks, and printed branches stack on top of one another until it’s unclear whether we’re looking out of a room into the woods, or looking back into the room from somewhere deep between the trees. In “No,” a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, cabinetry, and a bright sash window is overrun by streaks of orange, cyan, and ghosted lines, the emulsion lifting and sliding so that the figure appears to be stepping both into and out of the frame at once, part reflection, part residue, and part glitch. Her photographs collapse architecture, landscape, and chemistry into a visualization of “interiority”, for creative imagining, feelings, and memories, and synthesis of inside and outside.
“Blinded”
Beneath Konits’ spectral imagery of bodies dissolving into wallpaper, stretching across doorways, and curled into chairs beside sun-drenched windows, This Room Will Survive Me turns on awareness of a heady abstract question: what exactly is this thing we call “interiority,” and where does it live? We like to imagine the self as a sealed interior, a private chamber somewhere behind the eyes, yet consciousness actually unfolds in rooms, in bedrooms and hallways, kitchens and stairwells, those narrow zones between window and wall where afternoon light both reveals and withholds. The mind does not float above these spaces; it is shaped within them.
The inspiration for this philosophical understanding comes from two primary sources: Juhani Pallasmaa, Finnish architect, writer, and architectural theorist, who explains that architecture is not simply “out there” in the world but a mediation between that world and our minds. Donald Winnicott, pediatrician and psychoanalyst, understood interiority as a lived space of time formed between inner experience and the outside world, where we learn to feel present and real. Konits treats these not as citations but as working conditions. If experience is already structured by space and time, and if buildings are how we domesticate that structure into daily routines, then the rooms we inhabit, especially the first ones, are metaphysical instruments, quietly teaching us what it means to be alone, to be seen, and to belong. Her photographs live within this premise and ask, over and over, whether what we call “inside” might actually be the ongoing negotiation between plaster, wood, light, and the body that moves among them.
“Sinew”
“My goal in this work, if not in all of my work, is to express the importance of self-reflection, the importance of knowing yourself. In this case, to try to walk into a room and see what it makes you feel. Just be a bit more aware of how a different space makes you feel differently, how it makes you behave differently, and how it makes you relate to others differently.”
What makes the work relatable, even as it leans into dense questions, is that it never loses sight of the ordinary. These are not grand interiors or iconic buildings. They are the kinds of rooms most of us know intimately, modest bedrooms, narrow hallways, doors left ajar, a sliver of outside visible through a window. The metaphysics stays tethered to the fact we all inhabit buildings (at least 90% of the time), and we all have experienced at some point and felt, however briefly, the uncanny sense that the space remembered them. Konits’ photographs do not ask us to decode her biography; they ask us to notice how thoroughly our own lives have been built into the places we’ve lived, and how these places now inhabit us. The title, This Room Will Survive Me, at first sounds like a simple concession to mortality. After spending time with this work, it reads more like a description of a feedback loop: we build the room, the room builds us, the photograph fixes that mutual construction long enough for someone else to step inside and feel the echo.
In the end, what lingers from This Room Will Survive Me isn’t just the distinction of the images or the rarity of the materials, but the way the work quietly repositions where we look for ourselves. Konits doesn’t offer resolution; she offers conditions, a body, a room, presence in a moment of time, a fragile piece of film, and trust that if we attend to those with enough care, something essential about being human will come into view. The rooms she moves through will outlast her, just as the rooms that formed us will outlast us, but the photographs slip in between that fact and our everyday amnesia, holding open the brief moment when we can still feel the exchange going both ways. To spend time with these images is to be reminded that our so-called inner lives are not sealed off from the world, but woven through it in thresholds crossed, in light that returns each afternoon, in spaces that have quietly been thinking alongside us—no, inside us, for years. Konits has given that shared presence a form; the task left to us is to recognize where it is already at work in our own rooms, and to decide how we want to live inside that knowledge.
GALLERY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cindy Konits (b. 1954) is an American artist based in Baltimore Maryland and NYC. Her practice is lens based, encompassing a wide range of media to explore family history, memory, and identity. Her first experiments with photography became the solo museum exhibitions “The Best Woman for the Job” and “Now I See Kiev in My Dreams” with NEA and NEH grants to the exhibiting institutions respectively. Konits’ documentary short “The Way I See It” about her cousin who was Albert Einstein’s ophthalmologist, screened in 19 film festivals worldwide and was nominated Best Documentary Short. Her interactive work on CD-ROM “The I for Pleasure”, was curated for exhibition at The Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, and censored days before the show opening. In response to this and coincidental censorship at another prominent Baltimore art institution, Konits created the video “The Veil of Intent”, screened at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Konits won first prize in The Photo Review Competition 2021, and second prize in The Photo Review in 2022. She has won numerous Julia Cameron and Pollux awards, Honorable Mention at ‘Fresh’, Klompching Gallery, and exhibited in The Exhibition Lab, Foley Gallery, NYC. Her work appeared in “In the In-Between”, “Enimazine” and “F-Stop” online and in Shots Magazine, Photonostrum Magazine, and Creative Quarterly Journal of Art and Design.
She won a full merit scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art, then became adjunct assistant professor for photography and video art at Stevenson University, Baltimore. She designed the Digital Photography curriculum there at Stevenson University.
Konits researched and designed a cybersecurity awareness installation “Digital Intimacy” with the White House Office of Management and Budget IT Manager and with support of the DARPA Cybersecurity Program Manager. Konits also developed an online realtime collaborative family video editing project “Bits of Us” involving a new technology for the web. Fundraising for these projects remains in hiatus.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. Behlen is an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age.
Behlen’s Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Diffusion Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Seities Magazine, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021). He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two. Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!
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In This Room Will Survive Me, Cindy Konits uses afternoon light, architecture, and expired instant film to examine interiority as something formed in the rooms we inhabit. Through long, uncertain exposures and chance-driven chemistry, her images merge body, space, and memory into scenes that feel lived rather than observed. The work leaves a quiet proposition: our inner lives are shaped in thresholds, light, and time, and rooms continue to shape us long after we’re gone.