The Art of Being Seen: The Power of Photography to Reclaim Stories, Identity, and Ancestral Memory

“Held” by Kali Spitzer Chamonix 8” x 10” Camera with antique brass portrait lens; wet plate collodion tintype from her project “An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance.”

How Kali Spitzer Uses Photography for Healing and Cultural Preservation

There's a moment, just before an image reveals itself in the darkroom, when everything holds its breath.

That moment—quiet, slow, almost sacred—is where photographer Kali Spitzer lives. It's where her art comes alive. It's where the act of seeing becomes the act of honoring.

Spitzer is a queer, Jewish, Indigenous artist living on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her roots run deep—through the Kaska Dena people of Daylu (Lower Post), BC, on her father’s side and through Jewish ancestors from Transylvania, Romania, on her mother’s.

Her work is not just photography. It’s reclamation. It’s healing. It’s resistance. It’s a love letter to the community.

And for me—as someone who believes in the power of stories and the soul behind the lens—Spitzer’s work is transformational.

What Happens When We Are Seen

We live in a world saturated with images. But so few of them show us who we really are—who we feel we are, in the marrow of our bones. Too many of those images, especially of Indigenous, queer, and BIPOC bodies, have been taken without consent, framed by people outside the community, and filtered through a colonial lens.

Spitzer’s art rewrites that history.

She works almost exclusively in analog photography—35mm, 120 films, and especially wet plate collodion tintypes. The process is labor-intensive, precise, and tactile. There’s no quick shutter snap or instant playback. Every image requires patience, presence, and trust.

In that space—slowed down and intentional—Spitzer invites the people she photographs into deep collaboration. They decide how they want to be seen. What they want to wear. What story they want to tell. Sometimes it’s a face that carries the echo of an ancestor. Sometimes it’s a handmade object, a beloved garment, or simply bare skin and brave vulnerability.

The result is not just an image. It’s a mirror. A reflection of dignity, strength, softness, resistance. It’s art that stares back.

In the Darkroom, We Become Ourselves

The moment in the darkroom is where the magic happens.

Spitzer always invites her collaborators into the process. Together, they watch the plate transform: the image first becomes negative, then disappears, then reappears—sharper, bolder, more alive. It’s a kind of ceremony—a witnessing.

And in that moment, something shifts. You see yourself differently. Some people cry. Some see the face of a grandparent or the courage they didn’t know they wore on their skin.

This is the heartbeat of Spitzer’s work—real-time, reciprocal, reverent.

“The most important part of creating with somebody is that moment in the darkroom when people see the image come to life and they see a part reflected that empowers them,” Spitzer said in an interview with Lomography.

Self-Determined Representation

Photography, at its best, is a tool of agency.

Spitzer tells Lomography that she asks every person she photographs: “How do you want to be seen?” “What best represents you?” “How do you want the world to witness you?”

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They are the foundation of Spitzer's practice.

Her series, An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance, features queer and Indigenous people in all their complexity—sometimes adorned in traditional dress, other times nude, but always on their own terms. The contrast between the old-world tintype medium and the modern expressions of identity is striking—and intentional.

It’s a way of saying: We are still here. We are present. We are future-facing.

Art as Archive, Art as Memory

Whether working in 35mm or tintype, Kali sees every image as an archive.

A record of a person in this moment. A cultural memory. A legacy.

That’s why she doesn’t distinguish between documentary and fine art photography. Both are sacred. Both are storytelling. Both require care.

Her series The North, for example, focuses on documenting cultural practices in her ancestral homelands. It's less about aesthetics and more about memory—holding onto knowledge that colonization tried to erase.

It’s preservation in its most intimate form.

The Role of the Artist Is the Role of the Witness

Spitzer’s work is deeply communal. Her images hold multitudes: queer kin, Indigenous elders, two-spirit family, Jewish ancestry, lived resistance.

And she doesn’t place herself outside the frame—she is in it, with them.

There’s a reason people open up to her. She has lived this experience. She knows what it means to be doubly—or triply—othered. She knows what it means to hold grief and joy in the same breath. To not see yourself reflected in the world and to decide to create the reflection instead.

She doesn’t just photograph her subjects—she honors them.

Why Her Work Matters Now

We are living in a time when the lives and rights of queer people, trans people, Indigenous people, and people of color are being legislated, threatened, and erased.

Spitzer’s work says: We refuse to disappear.

In her quiet, careful, generous way, she is building an archive that says: We were here. We are here. And we will be here.

Each photograph is a refusal. A prayer. A promise.

Closing Reflections

Kali Spitzer’s photography is more than visual. It’s visceral. It stays with you.

It reminds me that photography can be more than art. It can be reclamation. It can be healing. It can be a sacred pause in a chaotic world—a place to be seen, held, and remembered.

In my own work, I strive to offer that same kind of space: where deep meets fun, where stories matter, where we don’t just take photos—we create them, together.

If you haven’t encountered Spitzer's work before, I urge you to seek it out. Let it slow you down. Let it challenge you. Let it open something inside you.

We all deserve to be seen—not through someone else's lens, but through our own.