Final: Catherine Chalmers
She majored in engineering in college and painting in graduate school. I think her work is more of a natural, scientific kind of photography than an artistic one. This results in beautiful work. A lot of her work depicts the passing of time and the workings of life, which I found inspiring. What drew me in was how she explores the passage of time and the bare mechanics of life. Her writing doesn't flinch from the unpleasantness of nature, it embraces it. The above artworks are from her series "Food Chain.". She documents in it a simple but ruthless chain: a vegetable is eaten by a caterpillar, the caterpillar is eaten by a praying mantis, and the mantis is eaten by a frog. It's a cycle of birth and death that happens again and again in nature. While it may initially seem cruel, it's all a part of the natural order. By recording this process against a stark white background, Chalmers draws our attention squarely to the subjects themselves, eliminating distraction a...