The Image: Kate Greene

© Kate Greene, untitled, 2009

I was in my first year of graduate school when I made this image. I remember feeling so uncertain of my vision. My confidence was low and my anxiety was high - living in New Haven was strange and I felt myself detaching from the relationships that I had held closest. A friend at school handed me a copy of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. This seemed like a guide that I needed.

I recall devouring that book and then trying in earnest to harness my emotional state and get lost in my work. I wanted the camera to somehow reveal something more than my own eyes could observe. I wanted to see the unseeable. This photograph was one of my first attempts at allowing that to happen.

This picture was made at a riverbed in western Massachusetts. I set up my view camera and composed the image just before twilight. I then stopped down my lens and left the shutter open as the daylight disappeared. It was a mystical experience for me to watch the river move as day turned into night and know that my camera had recorded this event on a single sheet of film. I had no idea if the exposure would come out or not. Lucky for me - it did.

- Kate Greene

Project Release: Kate Greene's "Anomalous Phenomena"

fototazo will be regularly posting new photography projects, providing a first look at work from select artists. This will give photographers a forum for releasing work publicly and visitors to fototazo a chance to enjoy a stream of new images.

Kate Greene was born in 1978 in Boston. She received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2008 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2010. She currently lives and works in Northern California.

These images have the working title "Anomalous Phenomena." Her statement on this project follows the images.

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Statement

My work stems from a curiosity regarding visible phenomena in the physical world. At the same time it is fueled by an anxiety that revolves around the hidden, the undetected and the unknown. I use Nature as an entry point into my examination of this interconnected wonder and fear and the camera as both a revelator and a witness. Influenced by the peculiar visual form of early occult photography, the symbolic content of 17th-century Dutch still life and the obsessive process of botanical recording, I photograph both carefully constructed nature tableaux as well as the outside world as it is transformed by light and time. By visually describing the phenomenology of Nature I attempt to elicit a sense of amazement in the viewer while simultaneously alluding to the gap between a scientific grasp of the physical world and the human experience of it.