Currently living near Kansas City, Photographer Cari Payer is a long way from her beginnings as a small child in rural Alaska thumbing through National Geographic magazines and imagining the lives and stories of the people and places within its pages. Her richly colored images still show hints of her photography journey, incorporating her training in portraiture and commercial work with her love of stories to create vibrant editorial images in a fine art style.
Cari has used the pandemic travel lockdowns to take time to dive more deeply with her love of more composed fine art photography techniques, creating a satire collection about COVID-19 fashion that was featured in multiple publications as well as a continuing collection inspired by mythological stories.
Cari has been fortunate to work with multiple international publications and companies throughout Asia such as Photographers Without Borders and Leica Akademie Singapore. She has recently moved her home base to the Kansas City area from Tokyo and is looking forward to her time in the Midwest.
Cari's work has been published in multiple magazines and shown in galleries including;
Berlin Blue Gallery Berlin, Germany
Brooklyn Art Library Brooklyn, NY, USA
Design Festa Gallery Tokyo, Japan
Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
Artist's Biography
A note from the Artist
I think of each piece as a moment of stillness, that brief pause between breaths, a moment where you can step out from yourself and the rhythm of your daily life and see the world around you a little clearer.
I have always sought to find effective ways to communicate with others, through photography I can visually share what I struggle to speak, sometimes through landscapes or street views, as visual interpretations of emotional reactions to tangible subjects and sometimes more abstract creations from a studio space. Due to a fierce belief that the world is made of the beautiful moments trapped between light and darkness I refuse to limit my images to one subject matter but prefer to think of the subject as part of the story I am trying to share about a feeling or moment, sometimes it’s an epic tale, sometimes its soft and quiet, and sometimes it’s a comedic moment of joy. I hope that each image I create can be a chapter of a story about the world around us that hasn’t been finished yet and I hope my images can inspire someone else to tell the next chapter in the way they choose to communicate with the world.
I am a huge believer in helping others find their artistic voice and deeply enjoy building a community of positive and supportive artists through my workshops, youtube channel, and other social media.
