The Trippe Gallery
Wild Elegance~Avian Portraits
It is in the early morning in a South Carolina marsh that photographer Kathryn Griswold waits patiently. Experienced from many hours spent amongst the reeds and cordgrass, listing to the cackle of marsh hens and the gravelly calls of a great blue heron, Kate knows just the right moment to press the shutter to capture these native birds in a dramatic pose of full flight or simply enjoying the sun on their feathers.
Griswold’s ability to capture just this sort of moment comes from knowing a species’ hunting practices and flight habits as well as she knows her camera. She integrates herself into its environment and waits for the animals to come to her. Once home, she will carefully choose one of the hundreds of photos she has taken and start a digital process in which she isolates the animal by removing its surroundings in a painterly way. “Even though the landscape of the Lowcountry is beautiful,” Griswold says, “I’m focusing on the bird, and really wanting people to see its beauty and its spirit. By eliminating the natural environment, I’m creating a portrait of this beautiful animal that you can really see.” Her arresting, large-scale photographs put the viewer face-to-face with the wildlife—an eye-level vantage that, Griswold hopes, inspires observers to be better environmental stewards. To Griswold, this work underscores the fragile connection between the power of nature and our modern ecological consciousness. “Birds and animals, they don’t have a voice,” Griswold says. “We are their voice.”
Kate Griswold has studios in Eastern Massachusetts as well as South Carolina. Over the last thirteen years, her focus has been photographing birds, particularly birds of prey and other large birds in the wild. Back in the studio, Griswold adds painterly backgrounds to her photographs, “it forces us to see he birds differently, out of context”. Griswold in interested in the historical spiritual symbolism of birds and finds photographing them a spiritual act.
