Artist’s Statement:
Tell me a story about a kiss.
“Kiss & Tell” is a collection of stories from strangers and friends that stem from this same simple prompt: Tell me a story about a kiss. When I began this project, I was just beginning a long-term monogamous relationship. Hearing these stories allowed me to vicariously experience the romance and excitement of secret trysts and one night stands. All stories shared with me were tape-recorded under the condition that the storyteller remains anonymous. Whenever possible, I traveled to the exact location of the story to create the photograph. When that was not possible, I looked for a place that matched the storyteller’s description. With each photograph, I reinvented someone else’s memories as my own. In story after story, kiss after kiss, the location became a main character. In photographing the locations, I was able to have my own affair with this character – the space surrounding the kiss.
Artist’s Bio:
Sara Macel was born in 1981 in Houston, Texas, and received her MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in 2011 and her BFA in Photography + Imaging from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2003. Her work has been internationally exhibited and is in various private collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Harry Ransom Center, and the Center of Photography at Woodstock.
Her recent honors include Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward, Top 50 Photographer’s in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Award, and she was named a winner in the New York Photo Festival. Sara received the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the 2015 Artist of the Year for the Stanley Franzos Award for Emerging Photographers, and was nominated for the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer in 2016. Her first monograph, May the Road Rise to Meet You, was published by Daylight Books in 2013, and a traveling exhibition of that work was shown in solo shows in 2014 at the Center for Photography in Woodstock and the Houston Center for Photography and Silver Eye Center for Photography in 2015.
In addition to her freelance work, Sara currently teaches photography at SUNY Rockland and CUNY Kingsborough colleges. She recently was an artist-in-residence at The Wassaic Project in upstate New York. Sara is co-director of the Brooklyn chapter of the photo non-profit Crusade for Art and co-curated an exhibition of Crusade for Art Brooklyn’s work for Photoville in 2015.