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Kolb, Kathryn Sweetwater Creek Woods, 3 Color photograph available in several sizes

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Kathryn Kolb
(Contemporary)

"Combining classic ideals with contemporary sensibility, Kathryn Kolb seeks out and celebrates abstract design in nature. Her painterly, highly structured compositions reveal the essence of her subjects without overpowering them…The overall impact of her photographs suggests a kind of infinite, dynamic calm. In these intriguing images, you can discover something new with every viewing."
--Jerry Cullum, Senior Editor, Art Papers

Born in Indiana, Kathryn Kolb grew up in the rural surroundings of Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1983 she received a BA in History from Emory University in Atlanta, concentrating on ancient Europe and the Near East. In 1984-5 she took photography classes at the Southeastern Center for the Arts, in Atlanta. Although Kolb has had no formal training as an artist, visual artists are found in both her parents' families, and her paternal grandfather, Harold H. Kolb, was a noted watercolor painter working in Boston and the New England area.

Kolb’s edi­to­r­ial work is char­ac­ter­ized by an artis­tic style with strong graphic ele­ments. Her pho­tographs have been widely pub­lished and have appeared in Smith­son­ian, Veranda, Rolling Stone, Nature Con­ser­vancy, Orion mag­a­zine and many oth­ers. Spe­cial pho­to­graphic projects Kolb accom­plished include: a series of envi­ron­men­tal por­traits of regional artists for the Atlanta Jour­nal and Con­sti­tu­tion; por­traits of for­merly home­less men and women who regained suc­cess­ful lives through Atlanta’s Samar­i­tan House, and self-published cal­en­dars of Atlanta and Athens musi­cians, includ­ing artists REM and Indigo Girls. In 1996, Kolb pho­tographed a med­ical mis­sion to rural com­mu­ni­ties in the Domini­can Repub­lic. In 1999–2001, Kolb pro­duced cal­en­dars for Geor­gia Forest­watch, fea­tur­ing unpro­tected areas in Georgia’s national forests. Her work was included in the Sierra Club’s Clearcut: The Tragedy of Indus­trial Forestry, and she illus­trated sev­eral arti­cles for Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine includ­ing a fea­ture on kudzu in Octo­ber 2000. Her Tree Series pho­tographs were fea­tured in the Oct/Nov 2001 Veranda mag­a­zine, and The Wilder­ness Soci­ety com­mis­sioned Kolb to pho­to­graph road­less and wilder­ness areas of the south­east­ern Appalachi­ans for the pub­li­ca­tion, Why Wilder­ness? What the Last Remain­ing Wild­lands of the South­ern Appalachi­ans Mean to the Peo­ple of the South­east, pub­lished in 2004.

Kolb‘s fine art series include black & white and color pho­tographs of land­scapes, trees and other plants from diverse nat­ural envi­ron­ments, often from the South­east­ern US. Her most recent work, mostly in color, explores abstract con­struc­tions that seem more akin to paint­ing than pho­tog­ra­phy. As pho­tog­ra­pher, Kolb stays true to the sim­plest form of her medium — all works are straight­for­ward, un-manipulated images, and she uses no dig­i­tal cam­eras or print­ing tech­niques. Kolb takes all pho­tographs on film with a Has­sel­blad medium for­mat cam­era and prints with tra­di­tional enlarg­ers, and includes a “full frame” bor­der on each print. All prints are pro­duced on archivally processed papers.

Kolb‘s fine art pho­tographs can be found in numer­ous pri­vate and insti­tu­tional col­lec­tions includ­ing those of the Geor­gia Museum in Athens, GA, the Arthur M. Blank Fam­ily Foun­da­tion, King & Spald­ing (Atlanta), Barg Cof­fin Lewis & Trapp LLP (San Fran­cisco), Geor­gia Con­ser­vancy, Emory’s Goizueta Busi­ness School, Geor­gia Tech, and the City of Atlanta.