Kathryn Winograd

The nature that is the subject of Kathryn Winograd’s photographs throughout her midsized, square-format monograph, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through the Camera’s Eye, has poignant beauty all its own. Winograd’s particular knack for framing and catching the specifics of light adds an extra and extremely appealing level of interest to the already remarkable objects she seeks out and captures—rather like a well-seasoned image hunter. This resonates manifestly in the image on the book’s cover. A fallen, arc-shaped, thick tree branch over water reflects on a glittering gold-pink-blue liquid surface. The shape of the wood and its reflection create a black-brown, eye-like shape. Two ducks swim in opposite directions in the middle, almost begging the question of whether one of the ducks is the reflection of the other. But each duck has its own minor reflection, proving them to be distinct and nicely shaped creatures. Flat on the page, the image brings to life the subtle gust of wind causing small ripples refracting light prismatically, like a glittering gem. The real and the unreal play against one another in this image and many other captivating images throughout the book.

It’s not solely the keenness of Winograd’s eye that makes her photography captivating. The unabashed oddity of some of her taste distinguishes her work from run-of-the-mill postcard-variety nature imagery. She photographed, for instance, “Owl Head at Beaver Creek,” which is peculiar because the head in question is not attached to an owl’s body. Winograd photographed it “on the rocking chair I painted for the cabin porch.” The seat is forest green. The owl no longer has eyes, and its beak is scarcely discernable behind some leafless twigs in front of and behind it. Neither gruesome nor particularly emotionally evocative, the image makes it clear that owls do definitely and naturally blend in with their surroundings. And it’s apparently not altogether unusual for Winograd to just have an owl head lying around to take a picture of.

The normalcy of mortality in Winograd’s worldview comes up in other photographs. She had, for instance, what she called a Dead Box that she located in her father’s Indiana hayloft. Filled with what she calls “scatterings,” there’s an oddly compelling Duchampian ready-made quality to the fascinating found things that Winograd gathered, including a mysterious jawbone with teeth, moon shells, a paper wasp nest, a skeletal mole’s hand and a catfish skull. All have subtle yet intricate textures that create eye-catching interplays of shadow and light, along with vagaries of hue that Winograd takes into custody with her camera to render the commonplace extraordinary.

Winogad holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Denver and a MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and has taught creative writing for some 40 years. Her work in This Visible Speaking includes evocative quotes from many writers and thinkers. These quotes generally serve as a preface to each of 20 chapters in which she also recounts her process of taking pictures of things that are usually near her cabin along Phantom Canyon, at 9,600 feet, also near her home in the Denver suburb of Littleton (which she notes is rife with exotic birds). Turning up in This Visible Speaking are William Henry Fox Talbot, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Albert Sands Southworth, Alfred Steiglitz, Henry Peach Robinson, Fredrick H. Evans, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Dante as well as Georgia O’Keefe, Julia Margaret Cameron, Bernice Abbot, and Lady Elizabeth Eastlake. While no doubt all have made an impression on Winograd, none are necessary to give meaning to her work. They do, however, demonstrate that plenty is going in Winograd’s mind as she observes her surroundings.

Words, however, are eclipsed by the elegance of snowy egrets preening near the South Platte River. Winograd grasped the crest of feathers standing up on the back of one white, long-necked bird, standing up, looking not unlike a it has a halo, the sun shining behind its head, plumes illuminated. In another photograph, a young flicker clinging to the side of a tree looks out quizzically at Winograd’s camera, its neck askew, not particularly aware of the funky black dots on its primarily beige belly or the orange stripe on its tail looking couture-level chic on its otherwise neutral-hued body. Interestingly, this appears beneath the chapter title “On Beauty and Finding a Dead Flicker.” The deceased bird appears on a following page in a much smaller photograph, smashed on a dirt road and scarcely discernable from the gray rocks surrounding it. Winograd unflinchingly recognized the remarkable state of flickers both living and dead.

A great horned owl scowling with a furrowed brow and gorgeous, almost tiger-striped feathers, sitting on a tree branch, holds his own. Cormorants, hawks, foxes, elk, deer, a widow skimmer, a night heron, a stellar jay, a yellow warbler, a red-tailed hawk, a bee, a kestrel, painted turtles, orchids, blue flax, wild geranium, lichen, and even a raindrop do the same, with Winograd capturing them in-the-moment, fleeting and glorious, amplifying the colorful, contoured, eye-delighting reality that simply is everything.