A self-taught photographer, Cathy Foreman has spent the last six years as a portrait photographer in a career that includes exhibitions, publications, and events across the Unites States, in addition to two art exhibitions in Europe.
Her career first burgeoned in 2014 as a volunteer event photographer for Durham's own, The Art of Cool Project. Cathy's unique aesthetic soon made her work well known among concert arenas and, up to today, she continues to be invited to photograph at various music venues. Her inspirations and love for musical experiences help her to use her lens to explain motion. In 2016, Cathy photographed singer Al Jarreau's hands during a live performance at the Richmond Jazz Festival, explaining her choice in portrait subject matter as "that's where I saw the music." Cathy boldly digitizes her photographic prints and portrait photography with textures and colors which she believes makes the photographed emotions and experiences "come alive."
In 2014, while on vacation in Milan, Italy with her mother, Cathy noticed event banners being hung to announce a large scale international art show. Months later, at home in North Carolina, Cathy received an email from a gallery owner in Israel expressing interest in Cathy's work and inviting her to apply for an international art expo in Milan for which the gallery was curating. Believing it was spam, Cathy deleted the email. Two weeks later, another email arrived from the same sender. This time, Cathy made a new connection within the letter and, after a quick Google search, she soon discovered that the invitation to the exhibit was for the very same expo she had noticed in Milan just a few months earlier. Cathy immediately applied and, as perhaps fate dictates, within 24 hours was accepted. With a great deal of determination to make it to Milan, Cathy created a GoFundMe page to support exhibition expenses and raised the funds, with the generous help of friends and family, to participate along with the 450 artists accepted worldwide into the expo.
When she's not traveling, Cathy is at home in North Carolina where she has loved and worked all her life. She is most content spending time with her mother and her son Johnathan. Cathy believes that "flowers are best offered to a person while they are alive" and through the gift of her photography, she is able to make that belief a reality.
Artist Statement:
I'm a fine art portrait photographer who learned early on that digitally manipulating both my black and white and color photographs fulfills my desire for the images to come alive and to convey the emotions of the story. By focusing my view on the face of the artist, I am able to place the subjects in the foreground by cropping my view and closing in on facial expressions. I illustrate emotion and bring the viewer into the most engaging and intimate parts of the experience. I believe that my photographs convey an intimate moment that can often be missed by the audience.
I'm best known for digitally manipulating my photographs. I apply digitized textures and a number of other simple edits to obtain the final look. These manipulations provide another layer of visual interest to my work and are intended to intensify both the subject and the action captured therein. My digital prints take on a more visceral experience given the added illusion of physical texture. As a photographer who primarily shoots concerts, I am constantly striving to illustrate that moment when a performer gives his or her soul to the audience; when they create a sound and an emotion, and then to make that come through in the photograph. For me, colors are emotions and sounds., textures are motion and physical presence and lights and darks are harmonies and rhythms ... they have to be in the story.
Cathy R. Foreman, Fine Art Photographer