Wake Forest Magazine invited five professional photographers who are alumni to return for 48 hours. They zoomed in on the Wake Forest they want you to see.

Kovi Konowiecki (’14)

When I think back to my time at Wake Forest, the feeling of liminality comes to mind; a time of transition, when I was occupying multiple spaces at once. Until I went to college, much of my life had been dedicated to playing soccer, and I was beginning to form a new identity as a creative thinker who occupied multiple spaces at once. I started to question my existence, what I wanted and who I wanted to be.

After being invited back to campus for this assignment, I wanted to capture moments of duality; liminal moments in time that resemble some of the emotions and experiences I had when I lived on campus. I wanted to make portraits that captured the space between; moments that are neither here nor there — the few minutes of pause between a drill at practice, when you escape for a moment and everything stops. The moment of pause between cafeteria work shifts, when I would oftentimes notice a Pit worker enjoying a cigarette as I rushed from training to make my morning class on time. The quiet moments of humanity and vulnerability amid the hecticness and vigor of everyday college life.

During my time at Wake Forest, I often felt regret that I had not chosen to be closer to home in California. Despite soccer being the primary focus in my life, I longed for the creative environment of an art school and for peers with similar interests to mine to help me grow. Being at Wake Forest, however, challenged me to expand beyond my comfort and brought out something in me that I wasn’t aware I had. I began to think about my surroundings in ways that were very particular to individuality, diversity and place, and I felt a strong urge to act and make a difference in the community. I was compelled to form my own community.

Looking back now as someone who has been working as an artist and photographer for nearly a decade, I am thankful for my time at Wake and the perspectives and spaces it gave to me. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Kovi Konowiecki (’14) was born in Long Beach, California, and he has spent much of the past decade based in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Europe. After playing professional soccer in Europe, he turned to photography as a way to document the things around him and shed light on different aspects of his identity. Kovi was selected to be a part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2024, and he was the first nominee to have two images shortlisted for the first-place prize. He was also an honorable mention for the 2020 Hariban Award in Kyoto, Japan, and was a Red Hook Labs New Artist in 2018 in New York. Konowiecki’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the British Journal of Photography, The Guardian and The California Sunday Magazine, among others. Kovi has exhibited his work in galleries and museums in California, Portugal and London.