Alumna Kaitlin Jencso won FotoWeekDC's 2016 Fine Art-Series Competition for her series "Disenchanted." This is the second win for Jencso, who graduated from the Fine Art Photography program in 2012 and won FotoWeekDC's Fine Art-Series Competition in 2014.
"It is really a pleasure and an honor to be recognized by FotoWeek DC a second time, and it is especially important to me because this is from an in-progress body of work I haven't received a lot of feedback on," Jencso said. "It's given me the extra boost I need to power through and finalize the Disenchantment book I've been endlessly editing."
Jencso's inspiration for the series came from a constant documentation of her life as a way to process every day. Never without some sort of camera, she's been in the habit of shooting reflexively. "I see the thousands of images I take as a visual diary that I use to organize my thoughts and see what I may subconsciously be reflecting upon," she said.
The images in "Disenchanted"are primarily of Jencso's family, taken over an extended period of time, and focus on quiet moments in rural or domestic spaces. Following recent deaths in her family, she described the series as a kind of brooding on the subject of transcendence—the fleeting ephemeral nature of time and the lingering heaviness that follows you after loss. And she doesn't reserve the word 'loss' solely for death. Jencso extends it to the degradation of ideals, relationships, hope, options—all things we have to come to terms with as we mature.
"I tend to gravitate toward beautiful, close-up, still imagery, and this type of space lent itself perfectly to self-reflection and creating an isolating environment where the feeling of disenchantment could live," Jencso said. "Although the people featured in my series are my family, I feel that the overall tone is universal and a space everyone can enter and relate to."