Artist Statement
Since the mid 1990s, my personal work has involved the creation of color and black and white environmental photography. I have always created images of places that are naturally beautiful. I prefer to create images that are perfectly imperfect, letting go of control and allowing the imperfections of the medium to take hold.
My main focus has always been to put myself into foreign locales to try to see the obvious beauty in a different way as I experience them under challenging circumstances: the difficulty of arriving there, the physical demands of the trip. Most of my photographs are clearly location-based but there are consistently elements of human existence-whether subtle or obvious. Only until recently did I begin to focus on the people of a place as well. Just in the last three years has my work begun to incorporate the wabi sabi-ness of humans too as in This Is Life in my Current Work.
In this body of work I explore the beautiful imperfections of everyday life as a portrait photographer. There are so many curious and lovely images that do not satisfy the requirements of commercial portrait photography but I, as an artist love the juxtapositions, expressions, lighting and textures that occur. Most of these images come from the outtakes folder of my shoots but are ‘heroes’ in my first glimpse of them during the initial edit.
In Succession I explore the idea of inheriting my view-literally and possibly figuratively as well-from my grandparents because I live in the house my grandparents lived in. My grandfather designed and chose it’s location and I feel I am successor to it’s presence over the town. This succession is taken upon as a blessing and a responsibility.
The work evolved out of a joint project with my husband where we took a picture from the same place in our home looking out over the town at the same time every day for a year. The images in this body of work have been captured from the backyard of our home over the period of 4 years. They represent my need to capture changing and vibrant vistas and be aware of the weather just as I did when I was on my mountaineering and sailing adventures. I have an innate compulsion to record the beauty of our natural world even from the confines of my home.
In Archive
In my work titled Fall From Grace, I include images that express what it is like to live in the mountains. Not in a house, but literally in the wild. For several years I spent my days climbing in the stunning and harsh backcountry of the Sierra Nevada in California and in the Sangre de Cristo and Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It is in these rugged environments where I escaped the mundane world of work, bills and responsibility. I quit my day job and moved away from family and friends. It was a time when all I cared about was living life on the edge. It was a very ego driven time in my life and that is expressed in the photographs in this body of work. The title “Fall From Grace” also describes the experience of several near death falls that I took while climbing at high altitudes.
In Maka‘i, the main focus is the experience of living on a boat being surrounded by the ocean and exposed to the weather 24/7. Maka‘i means ‘toward the sea’ in Hawai‘ian so these images are all about the sea-in the South and North Pacific near French Polynesia and Hawai‘i.
Nave Nave is a collection of images from the same 2 year trip but are focused on the land and the people. The words Nave Nave mean delightful in Tahitian. The images express the carefree wildness of French Polynesia and Hawai‘i.
My series 96815 is a collection of images that I captured while I was living and working as a photographer in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. My husband, Jim, and I lived on the boat in Ala Wai Yacht Harbor and then later in a teeny tiny apartment/hotel room in the Island Colony. We took The Bus to work into Honolulu every day. I had photography assignments all over O‘ahu so I had the opportunity to explore the real Honolulu. The images are less about the typical beauty of the island as a tourist would see it and more about the struggle of an absolutely gorgeous place and it’s people who attached to the land trying to find their way through the stranglehold of tourism.
Kristianne Koch specializes in on-location portrait photography for the contemporary family and child for all of Southern California. 949-702-7707 kristianne.koch@cox.net
