Katie Smith
My photography has centered around people, striving to capture the depth and complexities of seemingly mundane daily life. My inspiration has derived from living with five other people for most of my college career and the distinct personalities that somehow blend to form a beautiful community. The human experience has more commonalities than differences between every individual’s experience, yet, the nature of our society focuses on the individualism and separation between every person’s life. However, my work is made in the hopes of viewers finding pieces they relate to in my photos.
My series, “A Body is a Home”, is a glance into how upbringings and family dynamics have shaped individuals, specifically in the emotions that have been the hardest to express or trained to suppress. The feelings that are kept closest to us have been shaped by the homes we’ve grown up in and these feelings travel with us. This series looks into my roommates and how these experiences become a shared experience in the space and community we’ve created in our home together. My work took inspiration from Michael Jang’s “The Jangs” in his way of capturing the lives of his family members and making it feel personable to the viewer. This project addresses the trauma that our bodies hold and the cathartic release of allowing ourselves the freedom to hold such emotions with tenderness rather than with tension.
