Artist Statement
My personal research revolves around architecture, the development of urban space, and photography’s relationship to both. I’m interested in the intersection between photography and the built environment – how photographs can decipher or distill complex urban landscapes, or how they can transform mundane and simplistic scenes into something complex and provoking; how the photograph can be used to reveal an unseen history within a space, or how it can imbue the landscape with a history it has never seen.
In my on-going series titled Sites, I focus on the perpetual growth of the urban environment and how its constant flux seems to imbue the landscape with a sense of unrest or anxiety. Architectural trends, like the buildings they produce, continuously replace one another in the name of progress. Spurred by advancements in technology, the city is driven forward by a state of constant change. By intentionally reducing visual context and markers of geographical location, I aim to address the idea of the built environment without being clearly tied to a definitive place or era. By unpinning these photographs from a recognizable reality, I make images that function not as documents, but rather as reflections or micro-fictions about how the built environment seems at present.
Another aspect of my work revolves around the shifted sense of reality felt in a city that has yet to be inhabited by the people it was built for. A city without people and without the marks of history seems more like an architectural model than a place for living, and it is this disassociation of scale and temporality that drives my research on the growth of new cities located in inner-mainland China, a series titled Unborn Cities.
Behind all aspects of my practice is an effort to evoke a sense of disjointed realism; to jolt a viewer into recalibrating their original impression by creating scenes where fact and fiction fuse in an uncanny and unexpected manner – and where the things we encounter on a daily basis begin to take on a very unfamiliar presence. The images are not specifically documentary in that don’t claim to show things as they are, but rather as they seem, or as they might be.
Kai M. Caemmerer lives and works in San Francisco, CA. His current work explores aspects of urban space and the perpetual development of cities. He received an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Photography from Western Washington University. He has received recognition and support from the Stuart R. Abelson Foundation, the People’s Government of Shangrao City, The Luminarts Foundation, and the Dave Bown Projects grant. Caemmerer’s work has been exhibited nationally, internationally, and resides in the private and public collections including that of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL.
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