Analog Heat

The light in Houston doesn’t forgive. Summer there is just absolute—flat, bleaching, relentless. Tamara Lichtenstein shoots through it anyway, analog film, because digital bores her. She’s 20 and already committed to the slower path.

I respect that choice. Analog forces you to think before you shoot. You can’t fix it later. The light either works or it doesn’t, the moment either happens or it’s gone. That’s a discipline most people avoid. She doesn’t, which tells me something about what she cares about.

Her work is dreamy, soft-edged, intimate—the opposite direction of Houston light. She loves the photographers who changed how I see things: McGinley, Richardson, Teller. The ones who understand that looking is a form of exposure. That DNA is all through her work. The people in her pictures aren’t performing. They’re caught while she watches, rendered through her eye, which makes them stranger and more honest than they’d appear to anyone else.

The strange thing about the work is how interior it feels given how external everything around her must be. All that heat and brightness pressing down, and she makes images that feel like they’re happening inside a dream. That might be where the work gets its power—that tension between what’s outside and what she’s creating. I don’t know. But there’s something real happening there.