Sydney Lee’s (b.2002) intimate portraits, shot both digitally and on 35 mm film, explore the lightness and gravity of being. Lee is a Korean-American artist, photographer, and writer based in New York, with a BA in Economics and Philosophy at Columbia University. Spending her early years between the United States, the Philippines, and China, she began her pursuit of photography with a particular interest in exploring and documenting individuals and their relationships with others. She has produced work for YoungArts and work commissioned by Creative.nyc for group exhibition, and her pieces have been shown in the likes of M WOODS 798 Museum (木木美术馆) and National Sawdust, and published in The Gadfly. Her journalism can be seen in the likes of photo coverage for the Columbia Daily Spectator and New York Magazine, and video coverage for PBS Frontline.

Lee’s latest projects relate to the idea of one’s interaction with oneself, versions of oneself, both past and present, coalescing into a notion of the Self rooted in imperfect memory and knowledge, that interacts with the Other. Lee’s images seek to unravel and be unraveled, with individual pieces meant to be both brought together, as a body of work, and simultaneously to be taken apart. To linger in the joys and sorrows, the oceanic depth and unremarkable nature of being.