NHP artist Criss finds calling with camera

Justine Schoenbart

At age 12, Katherine Criss received an expensive gift from her uncle that changed her life: a new camera.

Until then, Criss said, her artistic experience was limited to painting. 

But once she owned a camera, she soon found that painting could not compete with the “instant gratification” that the darkroom brought her.

“The images came out right away. It’s harder when you paint to get the results that are in your head,” Criss said.

Although she choose to pursue photography at a young age, Criss has spent her career experimenting with a variety of art forms and styles. 

Today, she holds discussion groups for artists on a bimonthly basis at the B.J. Spoke Gallery in Huntington.

At these groups, which she refers to as “artists’ circles,” she and the attendees spend their time either reading a book on creativity or discussing an artist’s work. 

On June 14 and 20, Criss also gave talks at the gallery in regards to creativity and the challenges of making art, explaining her transition from film to digital photography, and then on to her current art forms of paint, mixed-media and collage.

As a resident of New Hyde Park, Criss said, she hopes to eventually be able to hold more of these discussion groups in her area. 

“I would love to hold one here in New Hyde Park, but I have not found local artists. I’ve looked, and once in a while I meet them. I’m still looking in the local area,” she said.

Now in her 70s, Criss said there were limited resources available to her as she began to develop an interest in photography. 

Even the high school she attended — the High School of Music and Art, now known as LaGuardia High School — did not offer any instruction in the field.

“You sort of had to do it on your own. There was a public darkroom and there were discussion groups, so I would go there. I would actually use the bathroom in our apartment on 57th Street,” Criss said. 

“No one could use the bathroom while I was developing,” she joked.

In addition to the lack of available instruction, Criss also faced the challenge of being a woman in an industry dominated by men. 

“You never saw a job listed for a woman as a photographer. In fact, it still is — to some degree — a very macho industry, especially if you are doing news and documentary photography. 

So, you have to be a little assertive,” Criss said.

But, Criss said, she persevered — beginning by photographing her two younger sisters. 

At age 16, she said, she recalls taking a photograph of her baby sister on a street corner that she felt captured the exhaustion her sister was experiencing.

After showing the photograph to one of the art teachers at her high school, the teacher took it upon himself to submit the photograph to the National Scholastic for photography awards. Her image received honorable mention.

“I think I won $10,” she laughed. “I was in seventh heaven. But it wasn’t the money. I got the magazine, I saw my photo — and that was it. You couldn’t talk me out of anything else. That’s what I wanted to do: take photographs,” Criss said.

She continued with photography by accompanying her father, a modernist American painter, on walks in which he would sketch. She would take photographs of subjects and scenes that he would sketch, allowing him to use them as a reference, she said. She said it “just became a part of her life.”

Following her time in high school, Criss worked at the second largest commercial studio in New York City, where three photographers employed eight full-time photographers who each had their own studio and lighting set up, she said. 

But Criss was not one of those photographers. 

She said she worked there to get her foot in the door, doing tasks like running errands and coordinating photo shoots. She said she hoped that after working for the studio for five years, she would be able to ask her boss for a job as a photogtapher. But her plan did not play out as hoped.

“When that day happened, they said, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t think we would give a woman that job, did you?’” Criss said. “The truth is — the equipment was heavy. But they hired a young man that was smaller than I was! So, on one hand, it was a letdown, but those things happen,” she said.

After getting married and having a child, Criss spent a short period of time doing projects that were unrelated to her interests in photography. 

But, she said, that didn’t last long. 

By the time she entered her 40s, she decided to go back to school and obtain a degree in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Since photography courses were not offered at the undergraduate level during her teenage years, Criss said, she had never followed through with receiving a college education.

“I really did it just to say I had a degree in photography,” Criss said. “I learned lighting techniques and alternative methods. That’s what a school is for — to expose you to these techniques,” she said.

It was after she completed her degree that one of Criss’s most exciting projects took off. 

Following her time working for a non-profit and doing marketing for a company that specialized in restoring old images, she was presented with the opportunity to do a major exhibit for the YWCA by using their archived vintage images from the past 135 years. 

In the year that she worked on the project, she copied images, wrote captions for them, and created large collages out of them.

“One thing just fed into another,” Criss explained of her career path. “The path in life all connects, and it gets you where you’re supposed to be,” she added.

Around 2000, Criss said, two shifts in her world resulted in a change in her traditional photographic style. 

The first shift was in photography itself — from film to digital — with the decrease in price of digital cameras to under $1,000. 

As the president of Professional Women’s Photographers, she said, companies encouraged her to switch from film to digital. 

“They said that if you wanted to compete, as far as the business world was concerned, you had to go [digital]. We had all the information because they came to us, so we didn’t have to go back to school,” she said.

The other change that occurred was more of a personal change. 

Although years back Criss had chosen to pursue photography over painting, she now began to miss the look that she was able to achieve through painting.

“I didn’t want everything crystal sharp. I wanted it to look like a painting but I wanted it quick,” Criss said.

Consequently, she began layering images simply by using film. 

To adjust to the digital age, she purchased a scanner and Adobe Photoshop software and began to scan the film, converting it to a digital form. 

She attempted to further transition into technology by layering the images on Photoshop, but she explained that she was not successful in doing so.

“I lost the feeling I was getting using film,” she said.

Beginning in 2006, she began to experiment with putting paint on her photographs. 

After doing this with multiple photographs, she realized that she could avoid using the photograph altogether and just paint. 

She began by sketching, creating pieces that she describes as “not realistic, but not abstract.” 

In 2012, she continued to transition into a new phase after going to France to attend a workshop in theory, led by her mentor Ernestine Rubin. She said she returned from the trip with images that she considers to be surreal and unusual. 

“When I’m with Ernestine, all my worries —  somehow they’re not worries anymore. I just say, ‘Oh, I can do that. That makes perfect sense,” Criss said.

Just as Rubin has mentored her, Criss hopes to inspire other artists around her. 

She said that she thought that her recent talks at the B.J. Spoke Gallery would be helpful to struggling artists, as she explained the difficult process involved in creating a piece of art. 

“It seems once you get it on the wall it’s just there, but you do go through some labor to get there,” Criss said.

Criss said she hopes artists who attended the lecture will continue pursuing their art, even in the face of discouraging words from those around them.

“I hope they take away the idea that it’s okay to break the rules,” she said. 

Criss also said she hopes that artists left her lecture feeling encouraged to embrace their creativity, just as she has done through her experience with photography and painting.

“Everyone has creativity. If you’re stifled for a while, just throw it off and just do it,” Criss said.

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