One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. — Dorothea Lange

About Katie

When I was 18, I thought I wanted to be an artist. As I came to the end of my time at sixth form college, I applied to and was offered a place on an Art Foundation diploma. It began with a week of each of the specialisms available, after which we would choose one field to specialise in. I was leaning towards either painting or mixed media… but then someone gave me a chocolate box with a pin-sized hole in it covered with a flap of ducktape, and told me it was a camera.

I exposed an image onto the paper inside, and took the box into the darkroom, where I watched as my tutor made my paper negative bloom with shapes and shadows.

It seemed like a form of magic, and I was hooked.

Over the next year, the caretakers kicked me out of the darkrooms so that they could lock up the building and go home more times than I care to remember. I found comfort in the clicks of development spools and the chemical scent of developer and fixer.

By 2009, I had gained my diploma, a photography degree, and a determination that I would not be making a career out of photography.

I ended up retraining in a completely different field, and photography became a hobby instead. Up until 2020, I mainly shot roller derby.

Unfortunately, as a clinically vulnerable person, I haven’t made it back into the sport again, despite it returning following a break during the worst of the COVID pandemic.

Nowadays, my mission is to shoot for fun more often, and perhaps to break out some of the film that’s been sitting untouched in my fridge for far too long.