There’s a bit of Proust in the young man, that much is certain. Christian Kummerfeldt, the 21 year old Guatemalan photographer whose work is featured in these pages, is quite purposefully in search of beauty – and consciously fighting to hold on to its memory.
In his words, “…by photographing you can fight forgetting… Looking back at the thousands of shots you accumulate after many years of hunting for epiphanies you finally discover yourself, indirectly and unconsciously through the many obsessions that control your work in infinite ways.”
In the photographs selected here we see a young man concerned with the solitary, the separate and the contemplative while maintaining a sense of both proximity and distance. Equally as powerfully, Christian is also an artist who maintains a sense of humor, dark though at times it may be.
Old Mr. Proust had one hell of a memory – enough so that he found a few thousand pages of lost time inside a teacup, but his real gift was lending those memories to his readers, giving them ownership of those remembrances. And, though it is far too weighty a comparison to put on him, Mr. Kummerfeldt might be on the path, as well.
It ain’t as sweet as a madeleine, but the image of the dead songbird above is so vivid that when I look away I swear I can almost remember how I watched it die.
