Sophie Barbasch is a photographer based in New York City. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. Sophie has been an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, the Ragdale Foundation, The Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio Center, The Prairie Center of the Arts, and the Center for Contemporary Artists, Woodside. Her selected publications and awards include The Atlantic Online, Conveyor Magazine, Scrapped Magazine, meatpaper, and Photo Boite’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers. She has exhibited internationally. Sophie’s upcoming residencies include the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and the Tofte Lake Residency for Emerging Artists.
The Source of Heat
I pursue contradiction and dislocation, like the misplacement of an object or the unexpected joining of two things. My pictures are like something you see out of the corner of your eye, unimportant but persistent—a gesture, a passing car, a snowball splitting into a million pieces—that is rendered significant through the act of photographing.
My visual vocabulary is about texture, weight, density–the heaviness of air, the gravity of bodies. Solid entities begin to move and kinetic entities halt to a stop. People that should be upright are on the ground; people that should be firmly on land are at sea.
These small contradictions hint at a world ever so slightly off its axis, where expectations are subverted and edges are misaligned. The resulting fissures between edges form the space in which my pictures exist. This space is not simply ambiguous but also uneasy and dark. It is a space where the unknown blooms, beckons, and engulfs us.
To view more of Sophie’s work please visit her website.