Sandy Kim Keeps Her Eyes Open

Sandy Kim shoots like she’s already forgotten you’re there. Her photographs—lo-fi, often explicit, always intimate—have the quality of something recovered from a lost roll of film: parties where everyone is undressed before midnight, skin in bad light, eye contact that shouldn’t exist between a camera and its subject. Just You And I narrows that focus further, two people and whatever happens between them when the rest of the world goes away.

Her work sits in that uncomfortable space between document and intrusion. You’re never quite sure whether the people in her pictures consented to being this exposed, or whether they simply didn’t notice. That ambiguity is probably the point. She photographs the way memory actually works—close, imprecise, charged with something you can’t name cleanly.

I find her photographs hard to look at for too long, not because they’re disturbing but because they feel private in a way that edges toward theft. Then you look again anyway.