Ann Katzen is an American photographer whose body of work represents a time capsule of pieces comprising more than fifty years of street, landscape, and travel photography. Through an illustrative and at times nostalgic look over the archive, Katzen relives a lifetime in pictures.
Torn between Italy and the US, Katzen’s photo diary is reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s subjective journalism and the hippie, youthful art scene she was tagging along with back in the day. Places like Detroit, Toronto, Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, Siena, or Florence become evocative sceneries for one-sentence meaningful stories told in simple, yet powerful words: a raven caught midflight after making noise on the roof, a boy collecting pop bottles for a dime each, or a cold winter view of the Niagara Falls.
The photographer is asking rhetorical questions because she already knows the answers. She doesn’t even seem to look for interpretation. The main point is to either send a message or to simply transpose the viewer into her shoes five decades ago.
Her album is the epitome of candor. In the selected photographs, she portrays women of different ages, countries, and walks of life. What brings them together is her lens and the possibility of reaction or lack thereof: “Do they confront with a challenging glare? Do they lower their head and quicken their step? Or perhaps they take no notice at all, locked in a rigid sense of invisibility. Either way, you’ve captured something interesting,” Katzen explains.
What would be the reaction of these women if they could see themselves now, immortalized, digitalized, on the Internet that would not be a thing for another twenty years?
Throughout the whole collection of photographs, there is a special sense of tenderness and care whenever her lens focuses on women. It pulls them out of inconspicuousness without being invasive. There is a significant documentary quality to Katzen’s work—as she puts it herself in her handle, once she was a camera—witness to the world, creating a chronicle of an analogue reality.
It is impossible to look at the photos she took without pausing and thinking about the people and places on them. We ask with the artist, “What became of you?”
Read our “Metamorphosis” issue in full
In the 3rd issue of RAWGUE., 24 visual artists and poets share a common pursuit: authenticity over perfection. The subtle art of becoming, the passage through various stages of artistic contemplation, the ever-shifting states of mind, feeling, and medium, or the act of altering reality to underline emotion or meaning – metamorphosis.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
