Karen Gregory Photography

Digital Artist

Using photography to better understand the world around us.

About

My Background

Regardless of having worked for extended periods in France, Spain, Germany and Finland and having lived in various locations across the UK, I still refer to the North East as home. A place where landscapes have been reclaimed and repurposed from heavy industry into the service industries; but where family, friendship and community spirt remain fundamentals.

My first outing with a camera, was as a 10 year old on a school trip to London, with my mothers Box Brownie. I saved up for 3 rolls of film and meticulously planned the photographs I was going take - I drove my teachers mad having to be in an exact location for a particular shot, but I got the photo’s I wanted!

So, with an obsessive need to plan and heavy industry in my psyche, I was destined to study engineering and work in a steel plant. This provided me fantastic opportunities to take unique photographs of an environment rarely seen, thus cementing my relationship with photography. I firmly believe that kind of ‘wow’ photography is what ultimately lead me to image manipulation.

Photography as Communication

I was a late convert to digital photography and found the transition from film to digital difficult, not least of which the ‘image processing’ and ended up at the local college taking a night class. PhotoShop Elements 8 was a game changer and 15 weeks later my relationship with photography had completely transformed.

The final exercise was image recovery - repairing an old photograph - I selected a very badly damaged image that took me hours to complete, working at the pixel level to match RGB colour codes. This opened my eyes to the potential of digital photography and propelled my onto the degree course.

On my journey towards creative, I’ve learnt the language of art; read and written about philosophy; scraped the surface of various ‘isms and delved into the Russian avant-garde between the two world wars - and all this on top of what I’ve learnt about photography!

The most amazing transition is my ability to communicate - to tell a story - using photographs; and I didn’t even realise that had happened. It was a marketing colleague who told me that developing my creative self has changed the way I engage with people and the way I look at things.

Sharing Stories

Bringing together both technical and communication skills has further diversified my job and I have created a number of ‘a day in the life’ photo-books for induction and training purposes, and promotional brochures for work events and facilities. These in turn have led to working with design houses to develop livery for the HGV fleet; working with architects on layouts and designs for innovation centres and working with artists on designing bespoke wallpaper for company vision and values.

My work requires me to develop bespoke manufacturing solutions and I use straight photography to document each stage of a project. However, my personal projects are conceptual and experimental and I continually ask: What? Why? and How? My photography challenges and subverts by means of deconstruction and subtraction, breaking the photograph down into its component parts, seeking to understand how images communicate and how that communication can be manipulated to create new meaning.

Leading me to the questions at the heart of my practice:

What is photography?
What is a photograph?
When does a photograph stop being a photograph?