CHARLIE SIMOKAITIS

In conjunction with the 2025 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present an artist talk by Charlie Simokaitis, as he discusses his project, The Crisis Tapes.

In The Crisis Tapes, the artist is exploring the effects of his daughter’s blindness and its psychic repercussions. When his daughter lost her ability to see over the course of two years, in addition to experiencing the physical disintegration of her vision, she also had a powerful psychological response to her imminent—presumably diminished—reality. Depression and circular episodes of deep mental un-wellness have since pervaded her life, and, reverberantly, that of her family, like a recurring grieving process. Moreover, as this domestic narrative was culminating, a dark political bifurcation was taking place in America, lending a backdrop of gravitas and anxiety. As the artist attempted to recreate this psychological state of mind photographically, the making of the work became a refuge from the life rendered within it. Drawing from an emotionally heightened, thirteen-year timeframe, the disorientation and confusion experienced in the day-to-day are distilled into a private visual journal. The photographs are created from everyday life—a life, for the artist's daughter, that grows narrower by degrees—and in which the act of seeing itself has been thoroughly considered.