Capturing visual quiet
An interview with local photographer Katherine Barr

The Durango Telegraph

Have you noticed how noisy our world is becoming? We even have a term, "white noise," for the ambient sound in our environment. Perhaps one of the reasons so many are moving to the mountainous West is for some quiet, which at times, after a snowfall on an early Sunday morning, even downtown Durango has a stillness about it. The concept of quietude has intrigued photographer Katherine Barr for sometime and her interest is not simply an auditory stillness but a visual tranquility as well. Last week, Katherine and I spoke at her home surrounded by some of the black-and-white photographs she has created.

JM: You say that you are drawn to the quiet in images. To my sensibility, your photos have a minimal amount of contrast, which is calming. Is this depiction of whiteness and visual quiet intended as a metaphor?

BARR: When I am out shooting in nature, I experience an internal quietude as well as the quietness in nature itself. This is an underneath quietness, for often there is both external noise and motion, like nearby traffic or wind, as well as internal noise such as the mind's chatter or excitement. Emotionally, I was drawn to the expression of quiet and calm that to me seems apparent in white. This quiet that lies beneath noise and motion seems always to be present and as time goes on, I am more able to contact it.

Read the rest of the interview.

Trio Series ongoing with three new artists at DAC

October 8, 2004
By Judith Reynolds
Special to the Durango Herald

Small contemplative photographs, inventive ceramics and over-the-top oil paintings make an odd trio. But that's what you get this month at the Durango Arts Center.

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Katherine Barr exhibits 12 new black-and-white photographs, some in pairs, plus two triptychs. A few images may seem familiar to those who know her work. Barr recently revisited landscapes she has photographed before. Her new images in their small-square formats have the quality of both memory and discovery.

Each of Barr's photographs gives the impression of something intensely observed. They breathe intimacy. Generally, the subjects are what many would consider minor moments: fog, blades of grass, forgotten dock pilings. Yet Barr's exquisite technique and thoughtful titles raise ordinary subject matter to a higher emotional plain.

For example, "Memory Traces" invokes earlier journeys and a sense of time passing. One of the loveliest is a triptych, "Change Within," a sequence in which time plays a role. Still, then wavering, grass suggests wind passing over and may symbolize an unexpected insight.

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Read entire Review.

Judith Reynolds is a freelance writer who specializes in the arts. Reach her through Herald voice mail at 970-247-3504.

On the surface there are many similarities. But if you look for the critical differences, you'll sharpen your viewing skills.

Both photographers operate on the conservative, classic end of the spectrum. It's called "straight" or "pure" photography. The subject matter ranges narrowly from nature to architecture. You may find a few human figures, but this is not humanistic, documentary photography. Nor is it experimental or "directorial" photography from the other end of the spectrum. No set-ups, no tricks, no darkroom funny business - all the images are rendered from the visible world.

Straight photography stretches down to us from the beginning of the medium, spurred along in the early 20th century by modernists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Ansel Adams took up the banner and applied its aesthetic to the heroic landscape. Barr and Headington carry on the formalist tradition of pure photography by finding beauty in the texture of stone or the drama of frost.

Among the telling similarities: All but two of the images are roughly standard size, black-and-white prints with a strong sense of design. All demonstrate a high level of technical bravura: velvety selenium-toned blacks, expanses of undisturbed tone, a subtle gray scale and thorn-sharp detail.

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In contrast to Headington's cool and elegant viewpoint, Barr gives us nature filtered through intense feeling. But there's nothing sentimental about her love of mountains, trees, rivers and rocks. There's nothing ordinary about her passion for snow or fog. Here is a contemplative photographer who seeks out moments in nature that reflect or extend an emotional state.

"Summertime" may carry a conventional title, but the pale gray expanse of water with its solitary black dock is out of the ordinary. That sense of solitude permeates many images, not always forlorn as here, but usually full and often joyous.

Several prints from Barr's recent "White Series" fill the walls. The purest of all is "In the Clouds," a delicate vision conceived in the highest range of pale gray to white. You see thin verticals long before almost imperceptible white-on-white clouds reflected in water. In a similar meditative mood, "Stillness of White" finds beauty in the mundane winter stubble of Florida Mesa. If the Greeks deified Mount Olympus, Barr deifies one tree in snow.

Barr's one big landscape, "Engineer in Spring," is uncharacteristically conventional. With its sunny clarity and expertly perceived design of opposing diagonals, it has strong general appeal, proof Barr can deliver an "Ansel Adams"" if she wants to. For me, it sets off the body of Barr's work, which at its best conveys a deeply felt, singularly intense experience of an unassuming corner of nature.

Read entire Review.

Judith Reynolds is a freelance writer who specializes in the arts. Reach her through Herald voice mail at 970-247-3604.

Open Shutter Gallery is located at:
755 E Second Ave
Durango, CO
970-382-8355
Hours - 10 am to 6 pm
"Perspectives" is showing now through May 19, 2004.

Commission show at DAC displays wide variety of art
The Durango Herald
January 13, 2004
By Nathaniel Miller

Katherine Barr's photographs are often pleasantly small, as though artistic bravado is abandoned in a ditch somewhere: "Look away if you will. Look close and you will gain." Her silver gelatin "Snowfield Tracks" shows clumps of grass emerging sporadically, fading in from the whit background and the endless snow.

The Power of Light
The Durango Herald
Monday, August 30, 1999
By Judith Reynolds

The careful observer will be rewarded at Katherine Barr's show "White, Light and Water."

In a dozen black-and-white prints, Barr presents what she does best - quietly intense meditations on nature. But this new body of work is lighter - emotionally and technically - than her last solo show. The word radiant comes to mind.
Barr is known for her technical mastery and strong sense of abstract design in the service of emotional expression.
Her thoughtful distillations of experience have ranged form near empty vistas to closeups of bark and stone. Last year's show, dedicated to Barr's late father, understandably had a sense of melancholy running through it - cloudy landscapes, broken reeds and solitary rocks.

This year, only one print reflects the elegiac tone that pervaded the 1998 exhibit. "Summertime" is a vision of a serene Vermont lake. Its broad bands of gray and off-center black focal point (a dock) stand in contrast to the other prints with their mood of delight bordering on joy - even ecstasy.

"Unexpected" is a dazzling image of that common wetlands plant false-hellebore, with its broad, veined leaves pummeled by an early spring snow. Barr looks down at this swirling mass of shapes and finds movement that radiates counter-clockwise, like a heavenly constellation, or Barr's "Inner Cosmos," exhibited last year and on display elsewhere at Voyager. Add to this a high-key gray scale with excellent definition in the shadow, and you feel the sun blazing as the snow melts. It's as if you were in that swamp yourself on a bright morning and this vision stopped you cold.

There's a new complexity to these prints that proves how powerful an eye Barr has for abstraction. She's also willing to experiment with shifting points of view in order to intensify expression. Two images of lily pads demonstrate Barr's ability to discover hypnotic patterns or unexpected equivalences - leaves and reflected clouds sharing one pool.

While the title of "Study in White" suggests an emphasis on tonal variation, the design draws the eye inward on a big S-curve countered by strong diagonals formed by the alignment of a rock and fallen trees.

"Primeval," the largest print in the show, focuses on a subject normally seen in color and the darkest of shadow - a tree trunk in a rain forest. No dense, damp moss here. Barr shifts her gray scale up to render an ecstatic vision of ferns and minuscule plants joyously covering the huge sculptural form - all reaching toward light.

In "Riverbed Flames" Barr plays with our minds and eyes. Like Minor White, the great American mystic with a camera, Barr obliterates any clue to the scale or location of her subject. It's a mystery whether we are looking at a vertical canyon wall or down at mud. Only the title and a wisp of weed, lower left, gives the game away.

Barr's experimentation, her freedom from formula, makes her an exciting photographer to follow. Every print is a new experience, deeply felt and seen, then perfectly rendered. Barr demonstrates the Modernist credo voiced for photographers shortly after World War II by Aaron Siskand: "To see the world clean, fresh and alive."

Artists display works at DAC and Voyager

The Durango Herald -1998
By Judith Reynolds

Artistic vision - what is it? How do you recognize it? When does it lapse into formula? These and other question surface in three current Durango Exhibits.

Barr's exhibition at Voyager Productions encourages viewers to take a long, quiet look at 20 prints that clearly come form a singular perspective. Carefully seen, perfectly exposed, and thoughtfully tilted, Barr's photographs distill intense individual experiences into form. That distillation is palpable in “Forgotten,” a tiny selenium-toned silver print of a leaf ground into dirt. It's felt in "Tranquility," a softer, gold toned silver print of a small stream flowing over rocks. Look long enough at these prints and you'll find telling details - sunlight striking a distant rock, thin blades of grass framing a central subject, a bark texture so abstract is echoes a Modernist like Aaron Siskand. A reflective quality pervades all of Barr's images. Interior landscapes? Metaphors for solitude or silence? The elegiac quality is all the more fitting since the exhibit is dedicated to Barr's late father who died one year ago this August. Only "Inner Cosmos," a sepia-toned silver print, bolts up slightly into higher visual drama.

Overall, what's expressed is a unified artistic vision. You know it when you see it.

October colors - DAC show is bright and well-balanced

The Durango Herald
Thursday, October 12, 1995
By Charlie Langdon

Now here's an autumn show for you. It's large and colorful, down to earth and relaxing.

The exhibit's balance is remarkable. Among the 100-plus paintings, photographs, quilts, collages and sculptures there is surely something for everyone.

Each of Barr's 22 black and white images is memorable. Some of them are stunning. "Haleakala Dawning," "Daybreak Two" and "Animas Tracks" will perhaps compel you to admire them a second or even a third time. "Oblivious," a study of two San Fransico children playing in a window is certain to make you smile or laugh.

Best of Show - 'Spanish Light' shines on Barr's photography

The Durango Herald
Monday, September 28, 1992

"Spanish Light," a black-and-white photograph made by Katherine Barr of Durango, was named Best of Show by a Panel of judges at the Four Corners Pro/Am Photo Show '92.

The best photograph of 61 entries depicts a patio table and chair next to an adobe wall, with a shadow dissecting the image diagonally, half in bright sunlight and half in dark shade. In both lighting conditions, detail of texture is present.

The photograph, taken in Santa Fe, also won in the categories of Best use of Black and White, and first place in the Black and White Potpourri division, both in the judges' and people's choice balloting.

Barr, 45, a late-bloomer in fine art photography, didn't pursue the craft seriously until she turned 40. Barr, excited that her photography was so well received, had words of encouragement for the general public. "It doesn't matter how young or old you are for being creative. I'd like to encourage everyone, whether they are 90 or five, to us their creativity."

Barr used a 35mm Minolta camera, 105mm lens, T-Max 100 film and printed the image under the guidance of Mike Rosso of A Photo Lab. "Mike looked over my shoulder and took me through the printing process step-by-step. He deserves a lot of the credit," she said.

Barr's other entry in the contest, "Haunted," a winter scene along the Animas River, placed second in Black and White Landscape, both on the judges' and public ballots.

View pictures of Katherine taking pictures by clicking here.