Catherine Johnson

Kitty began as a photography student at the Virginia Museum, Richmond, Virginia, in September of 1987. She enrolled in the basic darkroom classes and has progressed to the advanced courses. She has completed courses in palladium printing, advanced darkroom techniques and has taken numerous photography workshops. This fall she will begin a computer class in Adobe Photo Shop offered by the museum.

Kitty has been a member of Artspace, in Richmond, Virginia, since January 1996. Here she has participated in numerous group shows including a show of bromoil photographs (September, 1997) with local photographer Gene Laughter.

Her photographs have been shown in the advanced student shows at the Virginia Museum and have been selected for numerous juried shows at both local and regional galleries.

Kitty won the Richmond Times-Dispatch Kodak contests for (black and white) in the summers of August, 1990 and again in July 1991. Since this is a large metropolitan area, thousands of photographs were submitted weekly to that competition so the competition was stiff. She won the best in show for black and white photographs at the Jewish Community Center (May 1994). She has had pieces accepted by the On the Hill Gallery in Yorktown, Virginia, in juried shows sponsored by the magazine Aperture, in the summers of 1994 and 1995. Three black and white photos of river scenes were accepted for the traveling show, "A Celebration of the James" in the summer of 1996 (juror Ron Jautz). Two black and white "altered" pieces were accepted for the fall juried show in the Jautz Photography Gallery at Shockoe Bottom. Since 1996 to the present she has been accepted in most of the monthly juried shows sponsored by Shockoe Bottom Arts Center, Richmond, Virginia.

Most of Kitty's shooting is done in black and white, generally using a medium format camera, but she also does a substantial amount of her work with a view camera. She does some 35mm color, but she does not have a color darkroom so she is not as active in that medium. When Kitty does work in color, she prefers manipulated Polaroids so she can create her own effects without relying on a color darkroom or a computer program.