What the Grain Remembers

Houston in summer is its own kind of punishment—glowing asphalt, air that has actual physical weight, thunderstorms that materialize from nothing and vanish just as fast. That’s where Tamara Lichtenstein was living when she was twenty, shooting film of everything she could get in front of a lens.

She started with a digicam in school, the way a lot of people do, and developed what she described as an obsession with making people immortal. That’s a grandiose way to put it and also exactly right. A photograph doesn’t preserve a moment so much as arrest it—forces it to stop dissolving the way everything else does. At twenty, in Houston, working with analog because digital bores her, she was doing something quietly serious.

Her references said a lot: Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller. Three photographers with very different temperaments but a shared commitment to intimacy—the subject feels seen rather than studied. McGinley’s bodies in open daylight. Richardson’s relentless directness. Teller’s ability to make ugliness look like affection. You can see traces of all three in her work, and then something else underneath: a softness, a dreamlike quality that comes less from technique than from temperament.

She cited Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as an inspiration, which makes perfect sense—a film about memory as a physical location you can visit and then lose. Her photographs have that quality. They look like somewhere you’ve been but can’t quite place. Nocturnal thoughts and wandering daydreams made visible, on film, by someone who thinks making people immortal is a reasonable ambition for a twenty-year-old in Texas.

That kind of conviction is hard to argue with.