In one of my favorite photographs by Vaune Trachtman, lights from a thousand city windows weave upward into the night. If you go by the photograph’s title, “Prayer,” the commercial district suddenly sheds its steel carapace. And out of that dead bulk, something like an urban ziggurat appears. But even without the title, the transitory reach of light from living room to constellation creates a sacred contract with the image. Strange things like this happen all the time in Trachtman’s work.
“Transitory” is how Trachtman describes her own life. Losing her parents at a young age, she was moved from home to home. Even later in life, Trachtman rarely stayed in any one place for very long: Philadelphia to Rome, Rome to Vermont, Vermont to New York, New York to Seattle, Seattle back to Vermont. It’s like the question that Wright Morris asks in The Inhabitants: “where do you go when the signs don’t point anymore?”
You go to the work—inhabit its vacancies, if only for a moment.
Trachtman captures those moments. Not the moments of the photograph’s subjects: the dancer, for instance, whose limo will be turning back into a pumpkin soon, or the bridge that has already collapsed under the weight of geological time. Not those moments, but the moment of Trachtman’s own fleeting, wondrous, sacred inhabitation.
In this feature, Trachtman shares with Od Review the questions that move her from series to series, image to image, and printing technique to printing technique. For more, check out her website at vaune.net.
—Collier Brown