Maia Barbee is an Argentinian American photographer from Miami, Florida. She will be graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University with a BFA in the Spring of 2024. Maia works within the realm of analog photography and alternative processes such as cyanotypes, working with themes of memory, the fragility of time, and ambiguity within the natural world.
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Nothing exists without being remembered, a notion I hold close to my chest with both caution and veneration. Everything I have once laid eyes on takes up a space in my memory, whether it will be remembered or lay hidden amongst thoughts.
My photographs are my reaching efforts at reconstructing what I do and do not remember of my experiences as someone who does not know what my own presence means. By creating relationships between a figure and their environment, I stitch together memories from childhood that seem brighter than the rest alongside my current perspective. I often gravitate towards using objects that are transcendent of time, those that have accompanied me through childhood and those that have existed within my family before the concept of myself existed; a conch shell, my grandmother's chair and mirror, decades of archival photographs. The viewfinder of whatever camera my hands lay on is a lens into the past, a hope to connect to myself and unravel what it means to be present.