Senses Attached to an Experience
words: Isabel Legate
images: Kit
The first time I met Kit we were at the Hotel Delmano in Williamsburg. It was my first month in New York, and over ten of us were sitting in a booth; Kit’s talking while everyone is listening. Kit has a way with people. Maybe it’s his charisma or his crude jokes with just the right amount of perversion. Maybe it's the I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude that isn't truly an I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude, or the mesmerizing nature of his presence and the way his dynamism in social situations is mirrored in the powerful images that he produces as a photographer.
This is what is fascinating about Kit: his ability to coax people into unraveling in front of a camera— this skill is at once terrifying and beautiful. “I think I have a weird hypnotic power,” he tells me, “sometimes I think I am much better at getting things out of people than I am at taking a fucking picture.” According to Kit, for a photographer the process of getting things out of people involves building up rapport to “get someone comfortable enough around you to literally do anything.” It is his process of reading a person—and subsequently pushing them to the point where they open up in the most intimate way—that attracts Kit to photography. The quasi-social experiment that occurs “prior to metering and clicking the fucking button” is what Kit describes as being “the art”. This process is elusive, it is something difficult to capture with any man-made object, and there lays Kit's frustration.
Conveying all of the senses that are attached to an experience in a photograph is a challenge in itself. It isn't enough to simply have the experience, but to capture it on film—to “[take] a picture that does [the experience] justice,” says Kit, “I have to figure that out.” In a world where instant gratification has become a type of currency—where the act of viewing, absorbing, and shitting out an image is as natural as breathing— a photographer's position becomes one difficult to assume. “You see shit these days, you see it for like 2 seconds,” and after those two seconds a photograph becomes yet another archived Tumblr image stored in your bulging and abused occipital lobe. As I discuss this all with Kit—both of us visual artists— we became upset. “It bothers me thinking about that shit so I'm just gonna do whatever I wanna do,” he said, “I do it for me.”
As far as Kit's future: “I'd like to keep improving,” he said. “Keep doing what I'm doing and have people come to me.” His lack of self-promotion is evident. He has asked me to omit his last name and his website is run on Blogger with an indecipherable URL. He has a genuine investment in the photos he produces, and as he puts so eloquently, “I don't think happiness is tied to success so much as it is to the way you feel about what you are doing.”
“You see shit these days, you see it for like 2 seconds,” and after those two seconds a photograph becomes yet another archived Tumblr image stored in your bulging and abused occipital lobe.