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About
I photograph from far enough away that the people in the frame stay small. What I am looking for is the moment when weather or light organises a place — when fog flattens a beach into two tones, or an afternoon comes through a window and lays a grid across a wall. The figures matter, but they are there for scale, and to give the eye somewhere to rest. I would rather a picture describe a condition than tell a story.
Most of this work is made on foot, close to wherever I am living. The coast in a heavy sea fog. The plazas and lobbies of public buildings, which anyone can walk into and which are full of borrowed light. Ferries and footpaths, where people are between one place and another and not quite paying attention. I go back to the same handful of places until the weather does something.
I work in available light and don't stage anything. The frames stay close to how they came out of the camera — I adjust exposure and contrast and leave the rest alone. It matters to me that these are descriptions of things that were actually there.
Biography
Cecely Sterling-Maisel is a photographer from Berkeley, California. She began photographing in high school in Berkeley and continued at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she studied photography and spent a semester in Rome. Her work is made outdoors and on foot — coastlines in fog, the geometry of light inside public buildings, people crossing water and open squares. She photographs at a distance that keeps figures small, so that weather and architecture carry as much of the picture as the people do. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Olin Arts Center at Bates College, and she has an upcoming exhibition in Raleigh, North Carolina.