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Bette Kauffman

I am a photographer-mystic, encountering the world, striving to see and know the forms and spirit of things. I am interested in the glory and pathos, the heroism and hubris of humankind, and our struggle to find and create meaning. One influence is Georgia O'Keeffe, who could draw a banana plant or paint a landscape pregnant with the human condition. Another is Margaret Bourke-White, who saw beauty in industry. Subjects include people who work/perform in public spaces, the natural world and the built environment. Framing is a foundational aesthetic and tool of the photographer. Imposing frames on reality profoundly disrupts that reality, isolating, freezing, re-presenting a fragment of time and space, which humans by and large experience as continuous. Through framing and other photographic methods like selective focus, use of color & monochrome, and abstraction, I transform an encounter, a telling detail, a fleeting insight into an invitation to viewers to see and know as well.
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