Petrichor is a body of work bringing together the photographs of Dasha Dax and Abdulhamid Kircher. They met while teaching a black and white darkroom class together at the International Center of Photography. The collaboration emerged after endless hours in the darkroom and many conversations surrounding Dax’s ongoing gender transition, but this project began way before they met. In her own words, “This body of work somehow knew I needed to transition long before I did. I began making these photographs over 10 years ago when I built my first pinhole camera out of wood, using a lens that my mentor gifted me. The work evolved into a visual translation of dysphoria, smeared over an indiscernible amount of time, amid the intimacy of actualizing one's true form. It became a process of photographing the relationship I have with my body, and with lovers and friends who were also transitioning.”
For Kircher, photographing Dax came naturally in the midst of being an integral part of her support system, existing as a cooperation through both of their documentation processes; as he was making images of Dax and these environments, she was constructing self-portraits through various pinhole cameras. They delved into everything from before, during, and after her gender affirmation surgeries in New York, including her procedures, recovery, friends and visitors at the hospital, her mother's caretaking, and her past partners. As soon as she recovered enough to walk, Dax and Kircher began to print these photographs together in her darkroom, deepening their partnership and the evolving connection between subject and image.
Whereas Kircher’s photographs feel like concrete moments in time, Dax’s photographs feel ephemeral, through movement and abstractness they capture the places that her subconscious goes. The pinhole camera becomes an extension of herself through the absence of a traditional camera’s mechanics. By bringing their works together, a certain relationship between the internal and external begins to form.