Cindy Konits: This Room Will Survive Me

The images were made using an obsolete professional instant camera and remaining batches of expired, discontinued Fuji instant film. What might suggest immediacy instead becomes slow and meditative. Light drifts. Shadows deepen. A figure appears and disappears within domestic interiors, doorways, windows, beds, staircases and the edges of landscape. The body is present, but never entirely settled.

Konits’ rooms are not presented as neutral settings. They seem to breathe around the figure, absorbing and refracting her presence. The expired chemistry of the film gives the work its instability: soft flares, ghosted forms, colour shifts, distortions. These imperfections feel central rather than incidental. They allow the photographs to hover between image and recollection, between the physical room and the private life lived inside it.

The book’s subtitle, Architecture and Interiority, is a useful guide. This is not architecture as design object, but as a psychological and emotional field. Walls become thresholds. Windows become apertures of memory. The figure, often translucent or interrupted by light, appears almost like a trace left behind.

An essay by renowned architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa places the work within a wider conversation about space, perception and the body. Pallasmaa describes Konits’ Polaroids as fusing rooms and nature with a female figure, creating images of “nearness, intimacy and credibility.” The monograph also includes an interview with Konits by Gary Van Zante, Curator of Architecture, Design and Photography at the MIT Museum, whose own work has explored the intersection of photography, architecture and urban history.

There is a quiet tension running through the project: between permanence and disappearance. Architecture often outlives the people who pass through it. A room may remain after a body is gone; a photograph may preserve something that was already unstable. In Konits’ work, these ideas are held lightly but persistently. The images do not explain themselves. They linger.

The monograph was initially edited by Elizabeth Avedon and designed by Teun van der Heijden, bringing a strong photobook sensibility to the project. The publication includes 202 pages, partly Japanese binding, and 60 full-colour photographs in a 21 x 27 cm portrait format. The appeal lies not only in the subject, but in the atmosphere of the work: domestic, spectral, intimate, architectural. A study of spaces that continue after us, and the faint human presence they carry.

This Room Will Survive Me by Cindy Konits is published by Schilt Publishing & Gallery, May 2026.

*All images © Cindy Konits / Schilt Publishing
& Gallery