Katherine Agurcia
Katherine Agurcia is a professional photographer and visual storyteller based in South Florida. She has lived in Europe, Australia, and North America, and most recently in the middle Pacific on the island of Maui. She loves food, friends, travel, family, and focusing on the details. Happiness is about stopping to smell the flowers once in a while. Kat brings a fresh, bright, clean and sophisticated approach to her work, and her photographs reveal an intimate understanding of natural light, and a passion for documenting “the good life.” When she is not photographing people, places and things, she is managing a couple of lifestyle blogs covering some of her favorite things: Food Photography As a strong advocate of the visual arts, she also manages an online gallery dedicated to the development of new and emerging artists: An Otherwise Empty Room
She is always looking for unique and spirited individuals, children, and families to photograph. Check out her website at www.katherineagurcia.com.
Documenting Travel
"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence." ~Ansel Adams There is a moment in travel when feeling becomes superlative to words. A framed image is at once one and a thousand adjectives, each and the next inexact and inaccurate by itself. How to capture the noise of emotions, how to carry that landslide of unspoken words onto a single image? There is a deep melancholy to travel. I remember a passage in "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, where her traveling buddy is so overwhelmed by the powerful beauty of their present situation that all she can focus on is "remembering [she has] to return" -- as if there is not enough room in the moment to take it all in. There have been at least two times in my life where I have felt the immensity of the beauty around me so heavily that "images became inadequate," and I also was "content with silence." The first was on the edge of a cliff in the state of Victoria in southern Australia, watching the ocean rolling in during a storm; the second hiking in Zion National Park in Utah during a perfect summer day. The urge to document comes and goes during travel. The perfect photograph occurs unexpectedly, when focus and expectation are at their least demanding. When "words become unclear." It is a reminder to live in the present, to absorb, to acknowledge, and in some way capture not the decisive moment, but the "ongoing" moment, the pulse of a place. It is the eternally frustrating paradox of the traveler: to experience, or to document. It is a question that can only be answered one moment at a time.
All images © Katherine Agurcia