Conversations with Cara Taylor

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cara Taylor. 

Hi Cara, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I took my first black and white film photography class my junior year in college in 2015 at Bowling Green State University. I had been jumping from major to major since my freshmen year and was pursuing 2D art at the time when I thought it would be fun to learn to work in a darkroom. I still remember the first photograph I made on film; it was of an old basketball hoop in the parking lot of the apartment building I was living in at the time. The photograph was horribly blown out, but I remember watching the image slowly appear on the page in the darkroom when I first tried printing it and I thought it was like magic. From there I found my passion, large-format photography. I was lucky enough to have Lynn Whitney as a professor and mentor at BGSU and she really encouraged my love of large format and the darkroom. While I don’t exclusively photograph with my large format film camera, it’s definitely my favorite camera to make work with. After graduating from BGSU in 2017 with my Bachelor of Fine Arts, I got a job at a children’s museum in Charleston, West Virginia called the Clay Center, where I worked in the in-house art museum. While I loved what I did there, once the pandemic hit, I started to reevaluate what I wanted to do, and where I wanted go to, and how I wanted photography to play a role in my future and I decided that I wanted to make it a bigger part of my life again. I started looking at graduate schools and found this incredible program at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., that wasn’t just learning photojournalism, but videography, editing, writing, web design, all of these skills that could make me not just a better photographer, but a better visual storyteller. I’ve gotten the opportunity to learn from some incredible professors and work alongside a group of really talented and amazing photographers and visual storytellers and work on projects that have been really meaningful to me. Last year I spent the fall photographing climbers and white-water kayakers in the DC area and the New River Gorge in West Virginia; in the spring, I was able to work with a group socially active quilters and a business that aims to reduce lumber waste by using wood from fallen trees in cities. I’m excited (and a little nervous) about the prospect of graduating this May, but I’m also hopeful and excited for where photography might take me. 

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It has not always been a smooth road. As you can imagine, finding a job with a degree in Fine Art can be challenging. I consider myself really lucky to have found a job at the Clay Center right out of college, but it was definitely hard leaving my family in Michigan. I’d never been so far away from home indefinitely before so making that adjustment was hard, especially since I had never been to West Virginia and didn’t know a single person who lived there. I think I also lost my way as a photographer and artist for a while when I was living there. That happened for a lot of reasons, things in my personal life, adjusting to a new chapter of life, picking up the camera and going out to photograph sometimes felt like a herculean feat. But every time I did, I felt that spark and that love for making pictures again. After three and a half years in Charleston I started to feel like I wanted a change. I loved my job at the Clay Center, and I had learned so much while I was there but after the pandemic hit, I realized what I truly wanted was to focus on creating work once again. It was really terrifying thinking of uprooting my whole life again and moving to a new place where, once again, I knew absolutely no one, but in the end I’ve found this program so rewarding and inspiring and I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to create the work I am now without the education and support I have from my program. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a photographer and visual storyteller. I think what I love most about the work that I make, and what makes it unique is that I use a large format camera, and large format film. Imagine one of those old time-y cameras that has bellows, and to look through it you have to go under a dark cloth to see through the viewfinder, that’s what I use. Compared to a digital camera it’s completely analog so much slower process. It has all kinds of little adjustments I can make to the focus so on one hand, I can be really specific about how I want the image to look, but on the other hand it can take me a while to get everything just right. It’s made a little harder even because the back of the camera is what’s called “ground glass” where the image appears upside down and backwards. What I love though it the connection this process offers between me and who or whatever I’m photographing. When I’m photographing a person, we really end up spending a lot of time together while I set up. This way I end up having more time to get to know them, and they get to know me; overall when I use this camera it ends up being a much more personal experience for me and I think also for those who I’m making photographs of as opposed to the much faster way I can photograph with my digital camera. And people are usually really interested in the camera because they’ve never seen anything like it, so I’ll let them look through it so they can see what I see. I feel like this slower process really lets my photographs become collaborative between me and who I’m photographing, we can go back and forth and as I get to know them better that helps inform me of how they might want to be portrayed in the photograph and how I might best let their personality shine through the in the photograph. 

What do you like and dislike about the city?
Growing up in Dexter, MI I felt like all I wanted to do was get out and see new places and now, more and more, I find myself wishing I could go back. When I was young and growing up it felt so small and so far away from everything, and now, I realize that’s something to cherish. It’s a wonderful community set in these beautiful rolling hills, it’s where I learned to love the outdoors which has stuck with me and inspired some of my favorite and best work. 

Contact Info:

• Website: https://caraelizabethphoto.com/
• Instagram: @carataylorphoto

Image Credits
Cara Taylor