DVAA Member since 2019

Erika Kuciw

website:

www.facebook.com/shuttergirlphotography

About:

With an interest in photography that stems back to the tender age of 4, Erika Kuciw still remembers sifting through old family albums at her grandparents’ homes. Years later, a hobby of 60+ photo albums takes on a whole new meaning.

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Erika’s interest in photography blossomed, and in 1997, Erika began shooting pictures for local newspapers, theatre companies, public relations firms, and charities. As the new millennium was approaching, Erika photographed her first series, Intimacy, and began pursuing freelance portrait work. In 2004, art photography became her focus with the start of another series, Beautiful Confident Vulnerable Women. Erika completed her Isolation series in autumn 2014. Her most recent series are Inspiration: Bowie and 50 Roses.

Drawing on more than thirty years combined of professional and amateur experience, Erika specializes in portraiture, using her talents to capture the essence of humanity in color and black & white. With a Bachelor of Science degree from the New York Institute of Technology, where she minored in Fine Arts, Erika has also pursued technical coursework in photography at Long Island University.

Her work concentrates a powerful eye on humanity and our connection to one another. Observing the human form with an intimacy not always associated with the camera’s eye, Erika’s photos look through that form, to discover what exists under the surface. And though Erika most often leans her camera towards the human form, she has occasionally focused on nature with a sense of personification; this progress continues to develop.

Artist Statement:

“My camera is the connection between my senses. It’s not just how I view the world, it’s how I process it, how I make sense of it. I am not a word person; I think in images. And one of the most nonsensical words my lens lets me see an image of is Time.

I have always wrestled with the concept of Time, accepting the idea that it passes. Being forced to see myself grow, change, and age in the mirror and in photos, I grasp the idea that time happens - yet I barely understand how I’ve reached this point in my life. A photograph does not stop time from passing, but it does freeze time as it happens. That paradox is the basis of my work.

What interests me is photographing a subject in a moment of emotion, whether it be joy, fear, anger, loneliness... And in that moment, something happens. An image is wrestled from the greedy hands of time.

The themes of women and emotion have remained constants in the work that resonates the most for me, due to my own struggles to contemplate and comprehend my own being. I am invariably searching for something I can share with the world that represents who I am. In recent years, I am also focusing my lens on men and nature, and capturing humanity from those vantage points. As I have matured, what has grown is the range of the emotions I am sharing. My work in the last decade often reveals suspended instances of vulnerability, isolation, seduction, introspection, desperation, innocence, silliness, fascination, provocation, hostility, ascension. Much of my life was spent having no clear path to understanding, much less articulating, these sensations; it is only in the last decade that I realized the ability to conceive such consciousness.”