Cindy Waszak Geary is a
photographer & writer.
She was born in 1955 in Bluefield, WV, but lived there only briefly. Her family moved multiple times around the United States while she was growing up, but she has lived in and around Durham and Chapel Hill, NC for most of the past 50 years. She studied psychology as an undergraduate and as a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She became a serious photographer, in part, to share her experiences traveling around the world while doing reproductive health research for Family Health International (now FHI 360). She bought a Pentax K-1000, took several classes at nearby art schools to sharpen her camera skills and learned to print her own black and white images.
In 1997, she won Best in Show in a photography competition in a local weekly arts newspaper, The Spectator, for the photograph, Hands. Buoyed by this recognition, photography became an integral part of her life. For most of her research career she worked at FHI 360, beginning in 1980. A year before leaving FHI 360 in 2015, she began a creative non-fiction writing collaboration with friend and former colleague, LaHoma Smith Romocki. The resulting book, Going to School in Black and White: A Dual Memoir of Desegregation, was published in 2017.
She is currently working on the combined writing and photography Ancestor Project exploring the stories of her European ancestors who settled in various places in America, and how the circumstances and consequences of their migrations shaped her own life. She received partial support for this work from the Durham Arts Council 2020 Emerging Artist Grant in Photography. Five images from this series were exhibited in a juried group show in January 2021 at The FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill, NC. Additional work from The Ancestor Project was shown in a solo show, Landscapes of Ancestral Migration, at the Durham Arts Council in the fall of 2022. She lives with her husband Ron in Chatham County, NC. Her grown daughter lives in Ireland and her son and his family live in Los Angeles. When not taking pictures or writing, Cindy hikes in the woods, practices kundalini yoga, plays mahjong, and volunteers at the nearby Farm at Penny Lane.
“Photography is very much a practice of seeing with my heart.”
Words and pictures
Artist statement:
I grew up in a family where a camera was always on hand to capture family history.
As an adult, I continued this tradition. As I began to travel around the world for work, I used my camera to share my experiences of these faraway places with people at home. And what I found was that in the taking of these photographs, I created a connection between myself and the people I met along the way and the places they inhabited.
Taking photographs focused my attention on what I was seeing and feeling about the world around me that I wanted to show others. I chose black and white film because, for me, it distills an image into its emotional essence. Photography is very much a practice of seeing with my heart, and my photographs are meant to convey to others what I find beautiful and worthy of contemplation.
For many years I used very basic cameras—a 35mm (Pentax K-1000) and a medium format (Yashika-mat) cameras. I have always only used available light--no flash. I gradually moved from film to digital as digital technology improved, but I always loved film best. Lately, I have moved back to using film more often. I scan locally-processed negatives into digital files and work with them in Photoshop.
As I was cleaning out my parents’ basement, I found my father’s old plastic Imperial 620 and have started using that as well. The only control I have in shooting an image in the 620 camera is deciding where the best light is and where to point the camera. The shutter is slow and sometimes sticks. The images are soft and dreamy--not always what I am looking for, but I am in love with what takes me by surprise. I shoot digital when I need to see exactly what I am getting, when it is important that I get something clear and accurate, when it is important to document what is happening. I use my iPhone camera and a small Cannon G10 that has video (but video is never for art for me). I usually back up my plastic camera shots with some on my phone to make sure I have something.
I feel confident in my abilities as a photographer.
I can see the photograph before I see it, and I know how to work with it once the image is available to me.
I feel comfortable in experimenting with printing. I write also, when I feel the press of something inside me that needs to be heard, something that needs words to make itself understood, an urge that has come much later in my life than my desire to make photographs for others to see. I love words, but writing is a less clear way into what I know or want to say than creating a photograph. What I want to write is most often related to issues of racial and gender justice as it comes to me through my lived experience. My academic training as a social psychologist gives me a particular interest in the social contexts for human behavior that frames much what I write. As I have transitioned from research writing to essay and memoir my challenge has been to leave abstraction behind to become a story teller, plumbing the depths of my own psyche to find my personal connections to the stories I want to tell.
Photography and writing have generally been separate endeavors for me. My process for both is more or less inductive. I take photographs wherever I am and then compose them into conceptually-framed collections for exhibit or handmade books. Writing has been a similar process. The inspiration to write something often comes unbidden and won’t go away, even if I try ignoring it, until I start a piece. Words and images convey different kinds of information, and I have used them to communicate different things.
Until recently. Work on The Ancestor Project has changed that.
The Ancestor Project began as a series of essays I planned to publish individually and also collect into a book, now includes new and archival images that relate to the project of understanding my ancestral history. Both the writing and the photographs can be read and viewed on their own, but each are informing my work on the other.
As I was learning and visiting the places my immigrant ancestors had lived, landscape photographs were a means of creating an emotional connection with them and their experiences in those places. Some of these images have taken on a life of their own as I began experimenting with printing them on fabric and enhancing their emotional charge. I write about my picture-taking experiences as a part of my essays also, to explain how they focus my attention as part of my travel experience.
I am still figuring out how, in practical terms, to combine images and words to communicate what I am learning in this project and also to give the reader/viewer the most useful experience of the work.
I am mindful of how words and images can constrain the meaning of one or the other, and I have been thinking about how much I want to influence the process for the reader/viewer. I am currently exploring the creation of a photobook--or several photobooks--books in which the images are at least as dominant as the text. This, for the moment is my artistic edge--learning more about photobooks as an artistic genre as well as learning to make my own.