Sandy Kim

Sandy Kim utilizes a highly self-referential style of photography which peers into the tiny microcosm of one woman’s life. Reminiscent of the casual documentary style popularized by Nan Goldin in the Eighties, the photographs in Sandy Kim highlight her life at one particular moment and the people who are revolving in and around it.

—Jesse Pollock

Sandy Kim is pretty short, has a ton of hair, a broken orange backpack and always loses her camera. When that happens, she just gets a disposable and keeps taking pictures. It’s this lackadaisical tenacity that translates into her photos, how they always looked kind of busted but warmly worn in and comfortable. Like many young photographers, she’s made her friends her subjects — landscapes of young women, tattoos and San Francisco fog. But she never lays a soft hand, as if anything flattering in her photos is accidental. That’s not to say her photos are purposefully unappealing or harsh, but simply that they are so often just really gross — honest portraits of much of her daily life. But Sandy’s grossness is completely malleable, sometimes funny, sometimes horrific, sometimes unbelievably lush. Sandy is such a brazen and unafraid woman and that power continually streams strongly in her photos, across all spectrums of feeling and subject. Throughout Sandy Kim, there is a lot of blood, but that blood is never the same — blood on her sheets after sex, blood from a dead body covered in a sterile white sheet, blood on the hand of a friend after an unknown accident. He’s smiling, looking straight at the camera, at Sandy. They both know it will heal.

—Matthew Schnipper