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 and highlighting the quiet drama of survival.

Another gut-wrenching work is "sex" (BEFORE, DURING, AFTER), which depicts the mating ritual of praying mantises. In it, the female mantis devours the male after they mate—a macabre but naturalistic act that provides additional energy for reproduction. There's something hauntingly poetic about it: a beauty in the violence. Once again, the white background contrasts with the dark, rich green of the mantis, rendering the moment all the more raw and alive. 

These photos literally transformed my understanding of photography. I had always thought beauty existed in the new fruit, ideal light, or joyful moment—the "pretty" aspect of things. But Chalmers opened my eyes to realizing that there is power, significance, and even beauty in the messy, the forgotten, or the "ugly" as well. She taught me that when you're taking pictures not to buy or sell something, but just to look at it, your entire attitude changes. You start to see things that you would never see otherwise. And that, to me, is what makes her photographs so memorable.