Katherine Criss was 12 years old when she took pictures of her grandfather’s 90th birthday party.
“It was a family event. We only saw my grandfather once a year at holiday time,” Criss said. “I felt I wanted photographs of it.”
That, the New Hyde Park resident said, is when she began to realize that photography would play a significant role in her life.
Now, almost 30 years later, Criss is a visual artist who exhibits her work across the North Shore and conducts what she calls Artist Circle discussions on creativity at the B.J. Spoke Gallery in Huntington, where she became vice president last year. Criss will also have a solo show upcoming at the Huntington gallery in May, where she plans to display examples of her abstract overlay photographic style as well as paintings.
Last month she displayed her work in a group exhibit at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Huntington. She also participated in a group show of the Nassau County Art League several years ago and she is eager to connect with other local artists.
“What I really wanted to do with photography was to find out what was going on inside myself,” Criss said.
Criss moved from Manhattan to New Hyde Park in 2004 after her second marriage and immediately started to establish roots in the art community on Long Island.
Her subject matter is not always suggestive of place, but one piece in the new show will be multiple views of the Mineola Long Island Rail Road station.
Her most ambitious work to date is a self-published book of photos inspired by the attack on the World Trade Towers in 2001, “One Day – A New Reality, A New Yorker’s Journey Through Shock and Grief Surviving 9-11-01.”
She didn’t focus on the scenes of devastation from the Twin Towers tragedy, but rather the emotional aftermath of the events of Sept. 11.
Mentored by Ernestine Ruben, a world-renowned artist and teacher, Criss developed her own style of layered film photography to create photographs resembling abstract paintings. She used images of worker, images of people at small sidewalk memorials and images of the innumerable signs about people missing to fashion an emotional narrative about the wake of the tragedy.
“I realized we were in for a long struggle internally,” she recalled.
Her opening image was a simple shot of the Twin Towers before they fell, with a plane flying above them and a bird flying far below the plane. The final image of the book uses a recurrent central image of the statue of George Washington on his horse in Union Square Park with a peace sign on its flank, surrounded by multiple images of American flags.
“As I became more sure of what I was doing, I had them printed,” she said.
She said she produced the book over two months and actually organized the images for the narrative in the book for publishing over two days. She had a show of photos from the book at the B.J. Spoke Gallery in 2009. Her work has also been selected for both the 2010 and 2012 Long Island Biennial of Art at the Heckscher Museum.
When she was young, her uncle, who was a photographer, bought her a Minolta and taught her to develop her own black-and-white prints, she said. She did the developing in the bathroom of her parents’ Manhattan apartment.
“I would take over on Saturday afternoon,” she recalled.
Her father, painter Francis Criss, encouraged her creativity in all forms of visual art and arranged for her to attend a class taught by Bernice Abbott at the New School of Social Research while his daughter was still in high school.
In 1956, at age 16, a photograph she had taken of her baby sister gave her a boost when it earned a national scholastic honorable mention in Photography magazine.
“That was the first recognition I had that told me I was good,” she said.
She was studying art for hours a day in high school – now La Guardia High School for the Arts – was accepted for a young artists course at the Brooklyn Museum and regularly painting with her father in his studio. Along with the encouragement she received, Criss remembers hearing her father telling his students at the School of Visual Arts they couldn’t make a living as artists.
“It didn’t occur to me I could be an artist full-time,” she said.
She worked in a gallery after high school. Then for 10 years she worked in fashion photography, not behind the camera – considered a man’s occupation at the time – but organizing catalogs and interviewing models in what she considered a “dream job” at the time.”
Criss married, had a son and divorced, but never abandoned her camera.
“I was photographing on my own,” she recalled.
This included shooting events such as bar mitzvahs to help earn a living.
A turning point came in 1990 when she met a woman who commissioned her to curate a photography exhibit for the YWCA – “YWCA, Women First for 135 Years.”
“Everything just came together as I needed it,” Criss said. “I was shooting every day but I still didn’t call myself a photographer.”
That changed when she went back to school to earn a bachelor of fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, got her first freelance assignment and “was off and running.”
She realized she could create her own job as a freelance photographer and got involved in Professional Women Photographers, eventually becoming president of that organization for seven years.
She was simultaneously selling advertising part-time at the Village Voice and selling rights to photographs at a major “stock” photography company.
“I learned how to negotiate for money at this job,” she recalled.
Now, with her position as an artist well established, Criss said she would like to give back to the community.
“I would love to meet other artists in the neighborhood,” Criss said.
Reach reporter Richard Tedesco by e-mail at rtedesco@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204. Also follow us on Twitter @theislandnow and Facebook at facebook.com/theislandnow.
