PHO150 Digital Photography: Kate Breakey

Breakey is internationally recognized for large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs, including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers, animals, and insects. Painted Light is the first career retrospective of Breakey's work. It encompasses a quarter century of prolific image-making and reveals the wide range of Breakey's creative explorations. In her introduction and throughout the book, Breakey offers personal accounts of "the things that matter most" to her life as an artist and traces her influences, among them her fascination with classical European painting, her close connection to the world of science, and her heartfelt love of the natural world, which began during her childhood in rural Australia.

Small lives end every day--the unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a cat--as unnoticed in dying as they were living. Deeply moved by these small deaths since her childhood in South Australia, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains since the mid-1990s, creating stunning, oversized, hand-colored images that--paradoxically--glow with life. This volume is the first book-length work devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers color images from her ongoing "Small Deaths" series. These birds, flowers, lizards, and insects vividly express Breakey's desire to preserve each lost creature--to "freeze it in time, suspend it in space, immortalize it so that its beauty and its death are memorialized.