| Katey
Barrett gives us light and motion, the hot fuels of life, and
wraps them in a package of inscrutable beauty, the horse. She
takes us riding, faster than we'd like, as her thoroughbreds careen
around racetrack curves or launch themselves into the air, clearing
mean fences. She offers quiet moments, thick with tension. And
she gives us deep and lasting drama. A foal and its mother, a
champions final hour.
Katey Barrett's work actually owes very
little to the still photographers of the past or present. Her
earliest influences came in the 1960s with the Actors Studio
in Hollywood, where she immersed herself in directing. Indeed,
she calls her technique "cinematic" and pays homage
to the great visionaries of film, directors like John Ford,
Stanley Kubrick, John Huston and Orson Welles.
Katey Barrett is and always has been an
intuitive photographer. But her intuition is hard-earned. She
has had a lifelong love affair with the horse, dating back to
a proud old Saddlebred named Little John. She is comfortable with
horses, she knows their moves, and that knowledge has enabled
her to photograph the greatest thoroughbreds of our time
with the same integrity that Richard Avedon imparts to a portrait
of Bogart.
If Katey has a signature, it is the wondrous
sense of "movement" she gives to much of her most
admired work. The technique requires a carefully calculated
flinch of the camera at slow shutter speeds. The resulting smears
and waves in an otherwise recognizable image provokes fresh
and revealing interpretations.
Katey captures the essence of the horse
in many ways. She can give it to you cool and clinical, focused
and framed with each vein and muscle popping to the rush of
lactic acid. Or she can give it to you in a caress, imbued with
the lustrous warmth of the Impressionists, awash in the golden
glows of a dying summer sun.
What it comes down to this is: Katey
Barrett is a painter in photographer's drag. Instead of heavy
hemp, flax or cotton, her canvas is made from light-sensitive
silver bromide and iodide, mixed with gelatin and supported
by flexible celluloid film. Instead of oils, inks and charcoal,
her paint comes from sunlight etching a latent image that only
Katey Barrett sees.
Minor White most certainly was talking
about Katey Barrett and her horses when he said: "No matter
how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for
the photographer it has chosen".
Excerpts
taken from Eclipse-award winning writer, Jay Hovdey's introduction
to Katey Barrett's book, "The Light Touch". |
