CRACKED RIBS 2016
Photography by Cynthia Karalla / Interview by Karen Ghostlaw Pomarico
Stepping into Cynthia Karalla’s studio in Newburgh, just north of New York City, feels less like entering an artist’s workspace and more like slipping into a dreamscape — where reality and surrealism coexist in playful tension. You don’t merely view her work; you move through it. Towering black-and-white prints seem to murmur long-forgotten truths, while, just steps away, a garden of photographed flora traces a fragile timeline of blooming and withering — life and death unfolding in delicate harmony. This immersive, emotionally charged space is a mirror of Cynthia’s mind: curious and unafraid to rework the world around her.
Cynthia Karalla isn’t just creating art, she’s actively dissecting and reassembling reality with a fearless sense of purpose and a dry wit. Trained as an architect before turning to photography and fine art, she expertly balances structure with disruption. Her visual language pulls from the raw material of personal experience, especially a chaotic and formative childhood she describes as “an insane journey.” This personal narrative forms the foundation of Cynthia’s work, giving rise to art that is both deeply intimate and socially conscious, grounded in real experience yet often infused with dreamlike, surreal elements.
Her process transforms the negative — whether photographic, emotional, or societal — into something charged with meaning. For Cynthia chaos is fertile ground. Absurd Craigslist ads become biting commentary. Urban detritus is reframed as beauty. The overlooked becomes the unforgettable. Through humor, grit, and imagination, she invites us to look closer at the world’s messiness and discover the poetry hiding in plain sight.
Cracked Ribs, 2016 was born out of Cynthia’s need to cope with the physical and emotional stillness following an accident that left her with fractured ribs. To combat the monotony of recovery and find meaning in the pain, she turned to photography. While performing breathing exercises prescribed by doctors, she left her camera’s shutter open, capturing hour-long exposures of each breath. Many images didn’t survive the full duration, but those that did became quiet testaments to endurance, vulnerability, and the creative impulse that emerged in isolation — turning discomfort into a meditative act of creation.
With this series, Cynthia shares that deeply personal experience. By Pauline Joelle
“If you have ever cracked a rib you will relate well to this next venture. In the beginning, cracked ribs are the biggest stop sign you will ever be smacked with. Your busy days come to an abrupt halt and you realize how full your days were. The simple action of getting out of bed is like a long scene in a Bela Tarr film, or a “short” paragraph by Marcel Proust. Minutes transform into hours, hours into a day, just to take care of the simple necessities of life. There is a good and a bad to it all. At first it was a ‘not good’ moment. But when life throws you a curveball there is not much you can do about it. The doctors gave me breathing exercises to do. It hurt when I tried to breathe. It hurt when I tried to move. It hurt just thinking about it all.
While my camera equipment sat in the corner of my place in Italy, I laid around in wait. Waiting for life to begin again. Waiting, waiting, and waiting eventually turns into boredom. Boredom is the greatest gift bestowed upon an artist, or anyone else for that matter. It gives the child space to come out to play and little problems become part of the game. In that liberating child-like frame of mind, I set up my film camera and started doing long shutter exposures of my breath.
Breath is the first and the last thing in our lives and that is a big note. In the beginning of these experiments, I was home alone. My friend Maria Teresa called me to come out to play, but I could not hang out with her. Living in Italy is like being in a Fellini film. You can't help but laugh hard, so hard your cheeks can hurt for days. Laughing, sneezing, and coughing were at the top of my list of things to avoid. So, for the first three weeks of my boredom, I engaged in photographing my breath, alone.
It's almost impossible to disappear in the Sassi di Matera for three weeks. The people look out for one another and I felt honored to be included in this family. So, of course, the story was about the New Yorker who had cracked ribs. As luck would have it, some of my past models came by to inquire about me. Which opened the door for me to catch their breath in the long takes on film. It was amazing how much pain I was in, but it did not stop me from playing with my chemicals to develop the film, and scan, and review the daily shots. There is something about being locked in with your work; it takes the focus off the pain you are in.
I was shooting with my 500cm Hasselblad in black and white. This camera is a medium format with only twelve shots per roll of film. I told my willing subjects what outfits to wear.
One particular day we were shooting in the backyard of my friend Judith’s home, located up the stairs from my place. As the girls were ascending the staircase in their black and white outfits, some random dude yelled out loud, “Is it a black and white shoot?” It was as if Fellini was there in spirit. The girls cracked up in laughter, because no one knew the dude, and I could not hold it in either. Painful, laughter, awesome memories. The cracking of the ribs was a gift.”
In this interview, Cynthia opens up about the art of survival, the power of perspective, and why she believes each of us holds a monopoly on our own narrative. What emerges is a portrait of an artist who doesn’t just reflect the world — she reshapes it.
IN CONVERSATION WITH CYNTHIA KARALLA
Your early life was anything but conventional. Can you talk about your childhood and teenage years — how those experiences shaped your sense of independence, and how you navigated education, survival, and personal agency during such a turbulent time?
Two weeks after my eighth birthday, my father died in a boating accident, leaving me in a situation where two women were fighting over me, one step, one birth, both claiming to be my mother. This is where my life of independence begins. The courts placed me in a juvenile facility because I refused to live with either woman, I wanted my grandma. The place was useless for education and only held the lock and key to “Time Wasted.” To not waste my time, I would dream up new ideas of escapism; the attempts and the successful adventures I did; every month, a new adventure —
1 January - Out of an unlocked door. 10 Days gone.
2 February - Over a 16-foot fence. 20 minutes, caught.
3 March - Through an open fence. 40 minutes.
4 April - Out a third-floor window. 9 hours.
5 May - Out the back door of a car. 2 Years gone.
Yes, there were failed attempts, but at the age of twelve, a child's spirit is strong; it knows no boundaries. Each time I was caught, I got three days in isolation. I enjoyed my moments of isolation, reading books, sleeping a little extra, and having my meals brought to me; this was not a punishment.
The fifth time, I made it out successfully. I was missing for more than two years, and when I did return, it was with a lawyer. After this little adventure, there was nothing left to fear. Only the fear of wasting time.
Pierre Bourdie, states that for some people there is a Yin and Yang in life, happy childhood, miserable adult life. And then the opposite, a miserable childhood, a fabulous adulthood. Because my childhood was cut short, in my adult life, I am making up for lost time.
You’ve said that accumulating debt or financial comfort can come at the cost of creative freedom. Can you talk about that insight — how it shaped your career decisions, and how you've maintained artistic integrity without being bound to conventional success?
Yes, to be in debt, it can control your thoughts and stifle your creative process. But there are those that use the financial pressure to create. Some escape in their work and exit the thought of their financial obligation. As long as they don’t think about the money and only think of their creative process, there can be success. Balza accomplished a huge body of work, he worked through the night avoiding his financial burden as he hid from his landlord.
Just like everyone else in the universe I am in debt. There is nothing we can do about it. I feel like we were born with debt tattooed on our forehead. So, I blank on it and live as if today is my last. I speak as if today is my last. I work as if today is my last. That is the greatest gift about getting older, because we know today might be our last. The only future we have is this very present moment.
There is a line from Janis Joplin - Me and Bobby McGee, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. With nothing left to lose, the doors are wide open, go venture without the social restriction, escape the social prisons, and live your life. While working on a piece I might work it too much into ruination. The ruin piece opens the door to experimentation, because I have nothing left to lose.
In our life there is no such thing that you own anything. “That Anything” more than likely owns you. The most precious gift in life is owning oneself.
Your life story feels like a process of continuous reinvention through intuition, risk, and transformation. How do you reflect on that arc now, and what advice would you give to artists (or anyone) trying to build a life outside the lines?
Back in the 1990s, I moved to Greece. I took the plane to Athens. I rode my bicycle to the boat. I took the boat to Heraklion, Crete. I spent most of the day riding up and over an arm of the Psiloritis Mountain. Once at the top, it took me 45 minutes to ride down the other side without a foot on the pedal. I had no idea where I was going. Without knowing anyone there and not being able to speak a word of Greek, all I had was my intuition. Being in an unknown land without knowing the language is going back to the basics. Each day, I would travel in a new direction. No map was needed, just the landscape. I knew where I had settled, left of the mountains and in the direction of the sun.
One of the greatest life lessons I learned was while I was living in Crete. After all of my renovations, I still had no back door, and I was out of funds. For more than three days, I stressed out. How could I fix this? I had never built a door before. I did learn how to make a perfect batch of cement, but that was not going to help me build a door. After the panic attacks, I said, let’s examine a door, and in 45 minutes, I built a door with windows and all. Life is so much easier than we think; only the thought and worry weigh heavier than the action. Keeping life simple by being healthy makes everything possible. And never forget, we each have a monopoly; there is only one of us.
You started a business at 19, made money, and walked away from it — much like you later walked away from architecture school and a high-paying design job. What were the motivations behind these bold departures, and how did they reflect your evolving understanding of freedom, risk, and creative integrity?
I missed all of my schooling. Almost finished 7th grade, missed 8th, 9th and 10th due to the custody battle. After being tested for placement of which grade, they placed me in the 11th. After six weeks of 11th grade, we were back in court. That was then I decided no more and moved to New York to wait out the next two years for me to become seventeen.
Without much schooling, because of the custody battle, I was not sure what to do with my life. My boyfriend at the time talked me into his dream, his dream to own a deli. We were so young that we had to make his mother president because we were only 19 years in age. We were located in a small town in Nassau County, Long Island, NY., across the street from a McDonalds. The McDonald's coffee was disgusting; we became the big seller of morning coffee. While we were going horrible broke, I decided to design the twenty odd salad trays by color, to peak the eyes of these coffee buyers. I went to Balducci, that wonderful place on 6th Ave and 10th St. in the West Village. I bought little containers of salads by color. Copied their ingredients by taste and captured the coffee buyer's interest. Before long there was a line out the door and then people just stopped to get inline without knowing why.
Making money is easy. While we were successful in this business, it was then that I realized that we really owned nothing, it owned us. I needed something more challenging, so I left.
From my early years of missing my schooling, I really appreciated being in school. The business was a good learning project, but it was concrete. You can’t move from it. Through schooling it opens the world. Knowledge within, you can move anywhere.
I departed from the architectural school after I did four of the five years. It was difficult for the professors to understand that I went to school to learn, not for a piece of paper. Some schools advocate the paper and hope that you might learn something, some don’t but it is up to you what you do when you are there. At architecture school, I would ace design and fail on presentation, nine times out of ten I was still on yellow trace. Once a classmate asked me how I always ace it? I replied that it was easy, it is in all the books they prescribed for us to read. The boy looked at me confused, he never read the prescribed reading material. School is what you make it, the paper may be important for some, but the bottom line is what you learn, because school is just the appetizer to the main course. P.S — The most important card in your wallet is your LIBRARY CARD. Well now it might be Google and YouTube.
In the field of architecture, I was on door and window details for almost three months before I was moved up. Being the youngest and the only girl on the design team was the dream job. In the work field it is not really how many degrees you hold, it all comes down to how good you are and that your bosses can make a profit off of you. I was lucky to have a project manager that once worked for I. M. Pei. The project manager, Paul was one of the designers for the National Gallery of Art in D.C., he had a very open mind. His words to me were always, Cynthia this is insane, so insane, it will work. The clients always loved it. The thing about design is that your mind is attached to problem solving, twenty-four hours a day. A drawing board is a must in the residence, or you will sleepwalk to your drawboard at work. The brain does not know how to stop.
Right out of school I moved to a neighborhood where the seeds of gentrification were being planted. We really don’t know about gentrification when it is the printed word, but living through it is a real eye opener. Well, let me tell you about my hood; 51 of the 53 buildings burnt down to make way for the new money developers to build. One building we were able to save was filled with Grandmas and Grandpas, all above the age of 70. So many carted off to the hospital suffering from heart failure and scared daily. It was heart wrenching, that is when I started questioning what I am doing? Am I designing for people or the developers? This is when I left the field of architecture.
Looking back on your path — from survival and rebellion to creative reinvention — how do these experiences come together in your art today? What have they taught you about transformation, and what message do you hope others take from the way you've chosen to live and create?
“Photography is Dead” — These words of David Hockney are echoing around the world. I beg to differ; it is now getting interesting. Back when the camera first came into existence, the portrait, the landscape painters were, “What are we out of Business?” No, this brought in a new light, new ideas all the Art-isms were born. Artists had to think in a new way, because we had a new language and it is a visual one. Just as social media hit the airways, the portrait photographer was now being removed, as to what he thought the subject should look like, whereas now the subject becomes the author as to how they want to be presented. In the 90s, as soon as the digital camera hit the market, with one push of the button everything became Hallmark. Every time I bought a new digital camera, I spent the first day reading the manual and the second day breaking the camera to escape that Hallmark curse. I first started with the film camera, then on to digital, until I exhausted all possibilities. I return to film because there were so many more discoveries to be made. Building on the past knowledge but twisting it into the future. We all know what we should not do; the film negative is so precious, I splashed it with bleach, cut it in angles, shot during high noon, took sandpaper to Bergger fiber darkroom paper, sketched with a developer and shot with the shutter open for two minutes, all to transform the unknown into the known.
This is one part of thought in transforming photography, but all of this comes from the transformation within oneself.
There is a story I wrote during the pandemic about one of my escapes from the juvenile center, the one of me going out the third-floor window. After writing it, I thought, did I write this once before? I did, twenty years before. It was the same story but within those twenty years I had grown. The tragedy of the story now became humorous. The first writing of this story is still hard for me to read; the second writing is with the eyes of growth and the understanding of the world we live in. Every childhood is the perfect dramatic nightmare of their personal story or film. We are all blessed with the growing pains, and once we realize that it is the right of passage we can move on and grow, because we are all in this together.
I will end this with these words from Muhammad Ali — “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
You mentioned that even breathing was painful, and yet breath became the central focus of your work. How did your body’s limitations translate into the visual language of the project, and in what ways did the act of photographing become a form of healing or resistance?
With cracked ribs, breathing is the physical therapy to mend. So much in life we take for granted. We breathe without much thought about it, we breathe, we live, we don’t we die. This simple action took less time than trying to slide myself out of bed. In the beginning I asked for homeopathic medicine, the next day I was back asking for drugs. I was a mess in this beautiful land, the Sassi di Matera, in the Basilicata of Italy.
My work is never premeditated, always experimental up to a point. With the basic knowledge of the workings of the camera, you can dive into experimental territories. In order to run you need to know how to walk first. So, learn the basics because there are no failures. Failures are the entryway to new ideas, to build on.
The Cracked Ribs images were built within a few guidelines. The open shutter to possibly catch the unseen as movement versus the non-movement. The hierarchy of the project is the hard contrast between the light and the dark. It mimics the darkness we feel when our body is impaired, and the light is eminent on our road to recovery.
In the past I had a bad accident, where all the doctors told me that it was going to be two years of physical therapy and a lot of drugs. I refused the drugs and their thoughts. In nine months, I was back in action. Through drawing and making art the pain would leave my thoughts, making my body able to relax and mend. The body is amazing as to how fast it can heal. I think what takes the longest is for the mind to heal. There are studies that are out there that state; It is Mind over Matter. Our mind is the owner of our body. We can fix our body through thought and image. Locking myself into shooting, developing, editing, helped me forget the pain and without the thought of pain, the body relaxes to heal. As life would have it, it was a negative that needed to be turned into a positive by making me think in a new way. And this brought about this series Cracked Ribs.
Boredom and isolation are often seen as negative states, but you describe them as a gift. How did the enforced stillness of recovery and the solitude of your time in Matera create space for artistic experimentation and play?
Boredom is the word for Recharge. When I was studying at the Art Students League, I made an energy chart, so I could possibly understand my creative energy. Why some days everything flowed so effortlessly and other days NOT. My daily chart consisted of; What I ate? How much sleep? How many pages have I read? Fights with my Boyfriend? At the end I would rate my creative energy from what I produced in class. Then I started studying the Masters; Matisse, Pollack, Barnett Newman etc. Our primary energy in one week is only 25 hours. Then we have second and third power through the rest of the week. Art makes us naked, it discloses how we live our life and what we eat for breakfast. Art is the telltale sign of the amount of strength we have in energy.
Art is everywhere; you just need the energy to capture it. When in isolation you can hear your words in your head. We all have the creative gene within us. Some like to work in the turbulence, my preference is a much simpler way. Be healthy, only give your body the good that will give and not take away. This is my way to go down the rabbit hole and find Christmas.
On lovely Matera — The people in Italy are fabulous, Fellini is everywhere, laughter can make cheekbones cry, and the sun shines the most beautiful light. At one time when I first came to the Sassi di Matera, because of my friend Dorothy, I wondered how anyone could live in such a predictable little city, every day the same, nothing new. I learned after a few years how predictability was a solid ground that you can build on and not be the flower victimized by the storm.
You chose to shoot with a medium format Hasselblad using black and white film, with only twelve exposures per roll. What did this technical choice offer you, and how did the slow, deliberate nature of this process mirror or contrast with your personal experience at the time? Did the tactile elements — loading film, developing negatives, scanning — offer a kind of therapeutic ritual or structure during your recovery?
Every day is like Christmas. Loading the film is wrapping the gift. Pushing the button is the unknown gift. Developing is the unwrapping of the gift. Viewing the results is “the surprise”. When we shoot at times, we have an image in our head of what we wanted it to be. In our everyday life we do the same. And instead, we get something else than what we envisioned, but the beauty is there, unfortunately sometimes we are too young to know it. Gary Winogrand left this earth with 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film. Winogrand would wait two years before developing his film; he waited those two years to erase the image and emotional attachment of what he wanted. His theory opens the door to see the unpredictable beauty that is in front of us. It is the camera that teaches us to see what is there. It is the same with life and the expectations that society deems as success, while we chase an image in our head, we miss the beauty of life itself.
In six weeks, the pain disappeared like the flick of a light switch. Only because my thoughts were in the project, my body felt less pain as it healed. My dailies knew that without the cracked ribs I would have been shooting something else. So, the bottom line, it was worth it to crack my ribs.
Time seems to play a significant role in both the subject matter and the method — long exposures, slow recovery, and extended periods of stillness. How did this sense of stretched time shape your understanding of breath, pain, and photography itself? Did the long exposures create unexpected results that reflected your mental or physical state in ways you hadn’t anticipated?
Breathing was my daily recovery exercise that left me thinking all about the breath. I thought about catching my breath on film similar to an earlier project I did call, Move, Don’t Move. The past project was all about catching the energy of the people in five different situations. Through two-minute exposures the models sat in the company of a lover, family, work buddy, friend and then a solo shot. All the models picked their poses, some extremely difficult to hold for the two minutes. I was building on an old project.
While busy with loading, developing, test scanning, and viewing, time passes quicker than one would like. Being locked into the present moment the mind does not feel the pain of cracked ribs. This was my salvation, filming. I know if I sat still, the pain would be unbearable. The objective is to move and breathe through the pain.
The end result, without the premeditation and expectation of what it should look like, was all a wonderful surprise, just like life happening as it is. There was only one image that was redone to be pushed to a final image. Angels, we shot it one day. I developed the film, scanned it and sent it to the models. They all loved the image and were shocked when I said, “We must do it again”. The lighting can be better, and we did it, that was about as premeditated as I get. With my work I try to keep it as close to life as possible. That is the magic, bringing in real life instead of the imagination of what life could be. It is what it is and that is pretty special and that is what I want to capture, the unknown that is there, teaching us to see.
Looking back at Cracked Ribs now, how do you see it fitting into your broader body of work or artistic journey? Do you feel this experience changed your approach to image-making or storytelling? Would you ever consider revisiting this theme — through new technologies, writing, sound, or installation — to expand its impact and resonance?
Cracked Ribs is consistent with all of my work, taking what negatives life dishes out and turning them into a positive. Remembering it is a learning gift from the universe, to make us think and see in a new way. My work has no visual stamp that says, “it is a Karalla”. Stamping out a visual is suffocating as it leaves no room to explore the unknown. Looking at a Picasso you know it is a Picasso; it has that visual stamp. But viewing Anselm Kiefer’s work it has that universal feeling without the visual stamp. His stamp is the power of thought and execution. My stamp is the thread of life that dictates the present. When I was bleaching my negatives, I was asked about the process that I was using. When I explained that I was using my original negative and not making a copy, there was a big gulp. Just as we venture in life, we do not make a copy of ourselves to live life. I wanted my negatives to be a part of life, to have that human element somehow attach itself to it. To be more than just a recording, to have the effects of life also attached to it.
Through the ever-new technology that is forever changing by the second, in so many ways I still love the old school with modern thinking blended together. Not that long ago Dogme 95 was founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. In short it was a movement for the directors to escape the movie producers and become artists. Their shooting style was raw, with handheld cameras and even the actors would have no idea what the script was about. It was all in finding the new, walking the edge of the unpredictable. Even Robert Altman with his actors in the film Mash, he let them find their own words to define the characters. Venturing into the unknown opens the doors of finding what we don’t know.
So, trying new things is always an adventure. When I stop, I will be six feet under until then I will experiment forever, because I love Christmas.
You live in New York City but maintain a studio in Newburgh, about an hour north. How does moving between these two environments influence your process — and what kind of commitment does it take to maintain a practice across both urban and more rural spaces?
The contrast is night and day. NYC is rich in diversity; we love this city because of it. Manhattan is the greatest example that the whole world can live together in harmony. In Newburgh, when I first came here, I saw the division between black and white and just thought — No, I don’t want to live through this again, this is my childhood, Grosse Pointe meets Detroit. But and this is a very good BUT, there are a lot of artists moving up here and when you see the police officers being involved in community projects, it secures my heart.
Outside of photography, what practices, routines, or passions help sustain your creativity — especially when you're not actively making work?
I love Instagram because of the food recipes. My kitchen is the perfect place for playing in it. The first thing I do every morning is a smoothie. Most important is health, with health everything else is easy. I don’t drink alcohol or coffee. I feed myself things that are giving me the energy to play to see and catch the art of life.
Also working on my home, I love my home. Right now, I am working on the hallways. Hallways are magical, transitional from one space to the next. Most hallways are left blank, mine might be a bit over the top, but worth the walk.
And lest not forget driving, I love the road. The road is therapeutic and over the top interesting. You are a voyeur on the road viewing the drivers’ naked personalities. It is another whole other type of art. You have your characters; the polite drivers and then your speed demons that just found the gas pedal. Lest not forget those that break the law always driving in the passing lane below the speed limit. I am driving anywhere between two hundred and five hundred miles a week and what I find that is most impressive is the women drivers behind the wheel. They are owning the road with confidence, not as our mothers or grandmothers riding as the passenger, those days are gone. We are living in the best of times. History is in the making as we have hit rock bottom with our political situation. The Road is open for new ways of life. All of life is Art. No matter what is thrown at you, throw it back as a work of Art. Art is not a job; it is a way of life.
Just before Ed Kock’s passing. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch stated, “I've had a wonderful ride. I've done what I wanted to do.”
Cynthia Karalla’s career defies categorization, unfolding like a richly layered map of experimentation, reinvention, and unflinching honesty. From architecture studios in New York to a cement-mixed home in rural Crete, from intimate self-explorations to global exhibitions, her work follows both the literal and metaphysical landscapes of transformation. Whether collaborating with artists, teaching the next generation, or constructing entire worlds from Craigslist ads and castaway materials, Cynthia approaches every project with the same core philosophy: to mine the chaos of life for meaning, humor, and beauty.
Cynthia’s work has resonated far beyond gallery walls, finding its way into major museum collections and private archives around the world. But more than the accolades or exhibitions, what stands out is her unwavering commitment to truth — unvarnished, imaginative, and often irreverent. She has built a practice that turns adversity into alchemy and invites us all to reframe the world not as it is, but as it could be. In doing so, she reminds us that the real work of the artist is not only to see, but to show us how to see differently. Follow her and take a careful look at her portfolio and website to learn more about her practices and experience new inspiration.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List.
Extraordinary artistry, exceptional visual storyteller !!