Klea McKenna

Although she works with photographic processes, Klea McKenna is not a photographer in any traditional sense. Rather, she engineers ways in which light-sensitive paper can interact with the landscape and natural phenomena, capturing them in ethereal, often semi-abstract images. “This experimental approach means paring down to the simplest ingredients—light and paper—and making images that refer to location only through elemental form and color,” she says. McKenna uses a range of analog techniques, including hand-made cameras, outdoor photograms, and folding her materials to imbue in them an almost sculptural quality. “Ultimately the subject is light, both the science and magic of it and its profound role in our experience,” she says. Her best-known body of work is perhaps her “Rain Studies” series, in which she produces startlingly clear images of raindrops falling by the thousands—solving a longstanding photographic problem in a secret process of her own devising.