Artist: Jessican M. Kaufman

Jessica M. Kaufman was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1973. A painter in high school, she started photographing in college, and soon realized that she felt freer conceptually working in film than with paintbrush. Kaufman received a BA in Art from Yale University and an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art.

Based in NY, Kaufman has been featured in exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins, Robert Miller, The Camera Club, Williamsburg Art & Historical Center and most recently, the Stain Gallery in Brooklyn and San Francisco's Rayko Photo Center. Her work is in the collections of The Jewish Museum-which recently acquired two of her images from the Panopticon series-the Getty Research Institute, Texas Tech University, the collection of Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn, and other private collections in NY, Boston and San Francisco.

Kaufman uses Polaroid film to make traditional silver gelatin prints, a technique she favors for the more subtle and painterly effects she can achieve by leaving the chemicals on the Polaroid negative. "I am drawn to flawed, imperfect things," she says, adding that she likes not knowing what the final effects on the paper will be-sometimes spotted or streaked. This enables the artist to create impressionistic, painterly photographs that do not easily reveal a particular time or place. "I like eliminating the certainty about knowing what era the photograph represents."