Letter No. 03 | Natasha Chuk
Natasha A. Chuk, PhD, is a media theorist, researcher, and educator whose work moves between philosophy, art, and technology. Based in New York City, she explores how media objects shape perception, memory, and presence, how they act as both language and mirror, reflecting the ways we see and understand ourselves in a mediated world.
Her letter for Bisheh Project extends this inquiry with intimacy and precision. It is a meditation on perception, distance, and the unseen architectures of attention, a reflection that lingers quietly between thought and feeling. Reading it feels like standing inside the pause before an image appears, when perception itself becomes visible.
What moves me most in Natasha’s letter is her devotion to thought as a creative act, one that listens, questions, and restores our sensitivity to what surrounds us. Her writing opens a space for contemplation, reminding us that art, like vision, is not a fixed encounter but a continual unfolding.
Her newest book, Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect Books, 2025), deepens this exploration. In it, she examines how photography persists and transforms in an age beyond the camera — how images continue to hold time, absence, and the trace of the human even as their material forms dissolve. Like her letter, the book reflects a lifelong inquiry into seeing, attention, and the fragile dialogue between image and observer.
Natasha teaches in the School of Visual Arts and at The New School, where she bridges media theory, art history, and creative practice. Her previous publications include Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Un-experienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect Books, 2015).
I’m honored to have Natasha’s voice as the third in the Bisheh archive, a voice that reminds us that writing, like the photographic image, is both presence and disappearance, both vessel and light.
Learn more about Natasha’s work here: www.natashachuk.com
