Feature by Caroline Nieto
Photos by Yawen Yuan and Harper Rosenberg
Em Chmiel is a senior at Columbia College studying political science and fine art. She is a
photographer working primarily in digital and recently exploring film photography.
I met Em on a Thursday, and we stood on one of the longer lines outside of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. She snagged a table for us while I waited, and we bantered until we sat down with our respective drinks (mine a coffee, hers a tea) and could speak freely.
After browsing her portfolio, it was clear to me that Em’s photography can’t be confined to one style. Bleak interiors, barren landscapes, and nightlife shots all make up the scope of Em’s vision. She works with a brand of digital consciousness—an astute awareness of the screen’s power to create an alternative truth. The internet, and social media in particular, has become infamous for allowing ultra-curated versions of the self to pose as reality. But with the screen as an intermediary, Em sees this power to manipulate as an extension of the artist’s perspective. “A theme I’m really interested in is the presence of the medium,” said Em. “[Much of the time] we’re viewing on a screen, and I want to make viewers very aware of that.” She doesn’t ignore the fact that her photographs are shot digitally, in fact, she embraces how unnatural some of her work can feel. Her images feel irreplicable in the real world, often overexposed, double exposed, or curved inward with a wide lens.
DANCE FLOOR
It tracks that Em finds inspiration in the digital world—the first camera she used was attached to her blue Nintendo DSI. She eventually upgraded to a small point-and-shoot camera, a gift for a family vacation, and took the liberty to capture everything in sight. Her appetite for observance stayed with her as she grew, yielding images that feel fresh, rarely premeditated. But these days, there’s a distance between an inciting inspiration and the choice to pick up a camera. Em is careful about the work she chooses to make, and even more cautious of what she shares. “I don't really like to make [creative] things for the sake of making them,” said Em, “It’s really hard to motivate myself if I don’t feel a calling to do it.”
As a political science major, Em is inclined to view social phenomena with more scrutiny than most. She treats photography as an extension of her perspective, where her own thoughts and biases are intrinsic to her artistic output. Em and I talked about Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which positions a photograph as a small death, a memento mori of an irreplicable moment. This makes Em wary of street photography—even when a subject consents to the use of their likeness, they’re still at the will of the artist’s perspective. ”You don’t think about taking iPhone pictures like that. [It wasn’t until I began] using a camera on a pretty regular basis [that I seriously] considered the moral implications,” said Em. Sontag couldn’t have foreseen the meaning of her work in the digital age, where images take on a new life when posted online. Inimitable moments become basically disposable images that can take on meanings entirely divorced from their context.
Instead, Em turns the invasion of photography onto herself. Her photo series, “Unbaby” came from a period of personal struggle—just days before leaving the country to study abroad,
she discovered she was pregnant. She knew almost immediately that she would go through the process of having an abortion, leaving her less than a week to parse through the medical red tape. The pressure of this situation led Em to create her photo series, “Unbaby,” a walk through her experience with sexual health. Her own wellbeing, both reproductive and mental, had been at the top of her mind since the removal of her IUD last year; despite the inner turmoil brought about by both the insertion process and the ensuing hormonal effects, her doctors insisted she keep her IUD in. She questioned whether to prioritize her mental or reproductive health—her own instinct or the doctor’s orders.
Abortion is an issue as personal as it is political, and Em doesn’t try to define where one stops and the other begins, saying, “I don’t like drawing lines between where something’s art versus politics [...] I think it’s best to just receive things at an emotional, face value [level] and then go from there.” Given the precariousness of reproductive rights post-Roe v. Wade, Em doesn’t need to spell out a message in her work that’s already implicit. “Unbaby” presents a vision of sex education that hinges on its disturbance—each image holds the weight of discomfort associated with its setting. Em included a prose poem to go along with the images where she verbalizes this unease, describing “Unbaby” through the moments in her life when sex education played a pivotal role. To Em, the series can be described by “The metallic middle-school fountain tap water that I resuscitated myself with when I had my first panic attack in sex ed” or “The globs of Vaseline my grandmother taught me to coat my tampon in when I was learning how to insert it dry.”
“Unbaby” begins with an image of Em’s apartment, the place where she became pregnant, shrouded in darkness save for two dim lamps. Then a picture of a classroom in her elementary school, where she received her first lesson in sex education. There are two pictures of the waiting rooms of abortion clinics, the second being where Em actually got her abortion. This room is painted baby blue and lined with fluorescent lights. A mounted television shows a stock image of a lake, maybe a weak attempt to tame the austerity of the environment.
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The image that stands out most captures a medical examination room with a green gynecological chair in the center. Taken with a wide-angle lens, the image seems to close in on itself, aided by a flash that brings out the room’s actual darkness. Considering the intimacy of the procedures it houses, the room is uncanny, or as Em called it, “otherworldly and distorted.”
Though most of “Unbaby” is characterized by eerie interiors, the final image upends this theme, depicting the parking garage of the clinic where Em got her abortion. Above the empty parking spaces is a barred window completely filled with greenery. It’s the only photo in the series taken entirely with natural light, allowing for the shadow of leaves to reflect on the concrete ground. Em ends the series with a beacon of hope that growth can happen anywhere and in spite of everything. As she writes in her poem, “Unbaby” is not only marked by the sickly green of the gynecological chair, but “The window that I saw when the world began / to grow back green.”
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