Kate Breakey

Kate Breakey is known for her large-scale, hand-colored photographs, which often feature luminous representations of birds, flowers, animals, and insects. Beginning with a silver photographic image, she paints over this with many transparent layers of oil, melding together different media. Breakey also creates works with the simple outlines of photograms—invented by William Fox Talbot in the 1830s—and ones that relate to 19th-century botanist Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes and Imogen Cunningham’s and Edward Weston’s 1920s plant and shell photographs. Concerned with the themes of death in nature and the preservation of beauty through photography, Breakey wants to “tenderly record the beautiful bodies now in transition towards decomposition and disintegration,” as she says.