Rabbit Trails and Katherine Westerhout

Scenario: I’m looking for instruction/inspiration on how to automate print to web workflow in an Adobe software environment and run across a childhood-education program document from a San Francisco television station, KQED. I search around KQED’s website to see if I can find any additional how-to documentation for digital workflow (I *love documentation and hearing how people explain things). In my search I find a featured SF gallery with Katherine Westerhout’s work.

I know nothing about Westerhout’s work, her history, her perspective on life but can’t help but call out a good thing when I see it. What do I remember? Awesome empty/urban decay landscape photography—drawn to it for so many reasons but I love the parallel between a building/place that people invest years of work and piles of money into, then left to decay, and the human state (if I don’t keep my mind/heart/body in check, I experience the same thing)—it reminds me to keep up the good fight, to maintain, and to stand on solid ground. Another point: I enjoy listening to Westerhout talk about sitting in the environments waiting for the right balance between light and shadow—that to portray desperation and loss in her photos requires that she also properly convey an idea of hope and promise.

I grew up on an Air Force base, as well, and remember taking trips down to decommissioned missile launch centers—the idea of what these abandoned, decaying, empty places used to be does make a boy’s imagination go wild…

Check out the KQED page here: http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/gallerycrawl/episode.jsp?essid=27556