Katherine Wolkoff

Katherine Wolkoff was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1976 and grew up outside of Boston. She attended Barnard College where she graduated with a degree in American History in 1998. She received her MFA in photography from Yale in 2003. Ms. Wolkoff's work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times Magazine, Tank and V. She was included in the inaugural Art + Commerce Festival of Emerging Photographers in 2004 and selected as one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers in the same year. She has taught at Massachusetts College of Art. Katherine Wolkoff currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

In all her work, Wolkoff confounds our expectations of how photography communicates the essence of a person or place. Using almost the reverse lighting conditions that we are accustomed to in photography, she creates a deeper understanding of her subjects. While Wolkoff works with a large-format camera, typically used to render a photograph's subject in careful detail, she believes the essence of a character or site can be reached less by analytical and more by imaginative means.

Viewing her landscape photographs, we squint into the sun from within a forest, or see the glow of the moon illuminate dark trees. A parallel enigmatic sense is created in her portraits. The faces are turned in profile with only traces of backlighting revealing the features and expressions of her sitters. She reduces contemporary color photography to an almost monochromatic palette in these portraits, harking back to the proto-photographic silhouette. Wolkoff's vantages revel in a world of juxtapositions, tension, mystery, and beauty.