Pony Boy (Nada Series)

Catherine Jansen has been inventing, exploring and creating photographic processes that merge state of the art technology with traditional photography since the late 1960s. She has created artworks with color copiers, cyanotypes, and photography on cloth. From the late 1990s until today, Jansen has been working with a digital camera to create a visual vocabulary that builds photographs into a long format that can express psychological and emotional time and space within the image. After taking multitudes of photographs, she weaves them into increasingly complex and meaningful images. This work has coincided with over 15 trips to India, and is an ongoing project called The Nada Series.

Jansen’s first photographs were focused on the domestic landscape and her backyard garden. Now, her life has changed and her body of work has expanded to include her extensive travels and changing perceptions of the world around her. She has found that photographing and then merging images taken from several angles and perspectives gives a closer echo of her experiences. She also confesses that capturing images during her “down time” has increased her opportunities to photograph. It has made it easier for her to meet people, especially children, who have befriended her and allowed her into their personal lives. Intimate encounters with people, animal or places have, in her words, quickened her breath, and frozen her eyes.