For the past six and a half years, since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been living with my mother and my ex-wife in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York.
Photography began as a way of fixing light into memory. In these photographs, the changing light of the apartment — window light, refrigerator light, television light, candlelight, bathroom light, sunset light — becomes a way of holding onto daily routines, performances, care, illness, humor, intimacy, and aging as they slowly turn into memory.
Made over years of living together in close quarters, the photographs move between observation and staging, documentary and performance. The apartment itself became a small theater where relationships shifted, roles blurred, and light marked the passing of time.
Author biography
Neil Kramer is a photographer and writer based in Queens, New York. Working with staged images, performance, humor, and collaboration, he uses domestic space to explore family, masculinity, care, aging, and the shifting boundaries of intimacy.
His background as a professional writer for television and media informs his sense of scene, pacing, dialogue, and narrative tension. His long-term photographic work often begins with ordinary domestic situations and turns them into scenes of emotional, comic, and psychological ambiguity.
His ongoing project Domestic Theater examines a shared living environment where roles blur between family, former spouses, caregivers, and collaborators, and where performance becomes a way of navigating proximity, pressure, obligation, and love.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Photoville, the Museum of the City of New York, Head On International Photo Festival, DongGang International Photo Festival, FORMAT International Photography Festival, the International Center of Photography, and Houston Center for Photography. His work is also held in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York.