Cat Thrasher Photography
ART+LIFE
ABOUT THE ARTIST I am a photographer with an intense interest in the science of human emotion.
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As a photographer, I’ve always been partial to documentary photography, for its natural beauty and close truth. I started out my teens with a modest darkroom in my basement and worked as the photo editor for the school newspaper. In college at UVa, I was the president of the Virginia Photography Club, worked with the Fashion Design Club as the Director of Photography, and held the office of Photography Editor for the Virginia Literary Review. It was during this time that my fashion portfolio erupted and my interest in studio work began. As a researcher, I worked for a few years in two psychology labs at UVa: the Child Study Center, which is focused on child development, and the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Lab, which is focused on the neuroscience of emotion. My personal research projects have been focused on the development of attention-based emotion regulation in very young infants. In particular, I use physiological measures see what kind of emotionally motivating stimuli infants instinctively attend to. Where my interests collide is at the level of the documentary portrait. My goal in both research and photography is to hone in on people’s raw personality traits and knee-jerk emotional tendencies. This is no where more true than in my approach to family photography, which I see not only as a portrait of an infant or child, but as a documentation of a family, and how that family interacts together.
HOW HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE WORKING IN A SCIENTIFIC SETTING SHAPED THE WAY YOU VIEW YOUR SUBJECTS THROUGH THE LENS?
There are so many ways! There are two main things that I studied in the lab: attention and emotion. As stated above, discovering the true attention arc of children was the major inspiration of Fab 5. And in a sense, children are the easiest thing when it comes to photography. It‘s the adults that are the challenge! With adults, you can get sustained attention forever if you want it, but on what? So often, adults come in to get photographed and they‘re nervous. So, it becomes about emotion elicitation...getting them to stop paying attention to me and my camera and pay attention to something else, something they they feel passionate about, something inside of them. And that is the biggest challenge that I have in black and white: getting someone to relax enough to expose themselves to me, while I have
my camera there, and while I‘m ready to receive it. And I‘m still working on that. I am very curious about it, always thinking about how to get further with the next client that I work with. I‘m always learning. My favorite is when the client and I become close friends, at least for the period while they‘re in the studio, and they open up and let themselves become vulnerable to me. It‘s like being a therapist. They often end up telling me deep, dark details of their lives. And it‘s all confidential, these discussions. But of course, the pictures are usually not confidential. And that‘s the biggest challenge: getting someone to open up enough to let me expose something intense about them. It‘s the most beautiful part of living, that intensity. And I want to see it. Because we all have it! Let‘s embrace it!
HOW DOES YOUR WORK RELATE TO YOUR LIFESTYLE?
That‘s a great question I love this question! In focusing on studio portrait photography, I have two very different sides of my work: Fine art black and white portraiture, and Fab 5, which is a fast and easy portrait session designed for small children and busy families. We all have these two sides of ourselves, right? With me, there is a side that wants to work slowly, move slowly, be particular and careful, and wants to be able to physically touch my work, and experience the process tangibly. This side of me is also very interested in identity and
how we define ourselves, and this is what inspires my work in black and white film. In my Black + White sessions, I work a lot with people who are in a transition in their lives, and try to help them create an image of themselves as they currently see themselves. I think as adults, once we hit our mid twenties, we stop thinking about documenting our growth, and what I try to do with black and white is to try to connect with adults who want to take a moment and do that. I think this is really important, because there is often a 40year period in the mid-
dle of our lives when we think we don‘t even want to get pictures of ourselves because we are not changing. But we are. And when I first had kids, this identity transition happened to me very forcefully. I took a moment and asked myself ''what am I, now that I have these children? how have I changed and how have I stayed the same?“ It‘s about your identity transitioning from one stage to another, and some of it changes and some of it doesn‘t. There‘s some to mourn, and some to celebrate. Black + White is about acceptance of this newest defini-
tion of yourself. Fab 5 is completely different. Fab 5 is fast, I do everything digitally, and again, it was inspired by this psychology lab experience where I saw this attention arc in children and I wanted to transfer that arc to the photography studio. I also really wanted to create a family portrait session that was accessible to people despite their restrictions on time or money. I wanted to take the classic, accessible, OlanMillsstyle portrait studio experience and cross that with modern-day custom photography. The goal with Fab 5 is to make it as easy as
possible for people who just want to make sure they get pictures of their children without stress. And at this price point, they could easily do it without worrying about money OR time. And honestly, this was also me saying ''what is MY perfect photography session, for me and my crazy family life?“ So, Fab 5 is like my dream product, for me, if I were the client. It‘s a business based self portrait of CatThrasher-As-Mom. :)
TALK ABOUT THE RECENT COLLABORATIVE PROJECT THAT YOU WORKED ON WITH DR. VANESSA LOBUE AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY; CAPTURING CHILDREN‘S EMOTIONS.
Photo by: Cat Thrasher
This is a really exciting project! Six years ago I started a collaboration with Vanessa LoBuewho, at that time, was at UVA in a project to create a stimulus set of children making emotional facial expressions. I was working as a researcher in a child development lab, and we were constantly using photos of adult faces making basic expressions like happy, angry, sad, fearful, etc. The problem was that all of our research was done on small children and there was no current stimulus set available of children their age doing the same expressions. So we began putting together our own set of 46 year old children making the same emotional expressions. We were determined to get not only every expression from each child posing, but
also to include all different races. So as we began to complete the set, we realized that this was a resource that people across the scientific community were going to want to use. We completed the set about 2 years ago, and recently completed the validation of the set and have made the set available to the greater research community for use in studies of emotion. This has been a really awesome experience because it was not only a photographic process, but quite literally an emotional elicitation with each child who came in to get photographs. One question I get from people in the scientific community is ''How in the world did you get them to make these faces?“ And its funny,
Photos by: Cat Thrasher
because as a photographer who works with families, that‘s all you do, you constantly are just trying to get children to act and behave in a certain way during a short period of time. What‘s also fun is that each of those photo shoots were only 5 minutes long. And the experience of photographing children in such a controlled setting and seeing their attention arc from the moment they came in to the moment they finished was part of the inspiration for one kind of photo shoot I now do called ''Fab 5“ which is a 5 m inute photo session intended to take advantage of that attention arc in small children. People
sometimes think that children need to 'warm up‘ to an environment before they can show you their true selves or stop being shy, but I have found the opposite to be the case: children, as long as they are in a safe environment, get excited at novelty, and the first 5 minutes that you have with them is the only 5 minutes where they are paying attention to the task at hand. We are really excited to be able to share this stimulus set with the greater research community and looking forward to seeing the data that comes out of its use on studies of emotion!
Photos by: Cat Thrasher
DESCRIBE A DAY IN THE LIFE OF CAT. I have a very strict sleep schedule because I have to balance being in business with being with my family, so everything revolves around sleep. I wake up at 4:00 am every day in order to have a period of time where my mind is the most clear and I can make good decisions or execute creative projects before anyone else wakes up. Once the house is awake, the rest of the day alternates between child-related and work-related tasks. The kids get sent off to school, and I start interacting with clients doing photo-shoots and connecting with other photographers, clients, and vendors. I normally have at least one shoot a day; the rest of the day is spent on communicating with clients and other photographers, my assistant, and that sort of thing. I do this work in my home-office or my backyard photo studio, and I am able to work straight through until the end of my first child‘s school day, at which point I pick her up and generally multi-task until I pick the second child up and then the rest of the evening is devoted entirely to family. And that is really sacred - family time in the evening. It‘s really hard to not get caught up in how many tasks there are to do as a self-employed artist. You could easily spend every waking hour doing something for work, and even then it wouldn‘t feel like you have done enough in order to get to where you want to be successful. As the saying goes ''its great to run your own business, because you can work any 12 hours a day that you want.“ Though I will say the goal is always to give the impression to other professionals and clients that I have a normal work life and am 100% available during those hours. But the reality is that in order to run a business with small children in the house, the behind-the-scenes can be a very chaotic picture. The key, I have found, it to compartmentalize. And that is why I isolate the early morning for my creativity, and the evening for my family. Those are very sacred times for each activity that I try not to deviate from, ever.
FAVOURITE RECENT IMAGE.
My favorite recent image is of my dear friends Emily Blout and Mike Signer with their newborn twins. It was a moment of authenticity for them in the intense early days of their babies‘ lives: Mike was just smitten with his new sons, and he was giving one of them a little smooch, and then Emily just leaned against him, a bit tired from their many recent sleepless nights. She looked right at me, and I asked them both to stay still, to freeze. One baby was crying at the time. Emily is such a natural with them, and so part of the full-family portrait, for me, was that it was centered on her, and how she‘s balancing the needs of her entire family. It‘s totally second-nature to her, and you can see it in her posture, how comfortable she is… her pose was a physical representation of her willingness to acknowledge that she‘s simultaneously elated and exhausted. That‘s motherhood, and that‘s Emily.
Photo by: Cat Thrasher
TELL ME A STORY
Before I switched to film, I took a mini-sabbatical from digital photography and spent some time painting instead. I sat in my old studio and spent three weeks painting in oils, including a portrait of my husband, Jim. That period changed me. It slowed me down. I think we all move a little too fast nowadays. We need to slow down. Paint. Think. Create slowly.
morning...the best part of the day! FRESH! Rested! New! The world awaits! noon...mmmm, lunch! night...I get so tired starting at 5pm, that I can barely keep my eyes open. perfect happiness...holding my children, Lulu and Veronica. preposterous...southern republicans who constantly vote against themselves. fear...always needs acknowledgement. love...will defeat fear! extravagance...can be fun. texture...so important! comedy...heals everything. work...is fun! most interesting thing in your wallet/purse...My -9.0 glasses prescription. in another life, you’d be...a Senator. lucky charm...my passport. prized possession...my children! Nonliving: my greatgrandmother‘s wedding band. a dream dinner party would be made up of who (dead or alive)...my grandparents (all 4), Irving Penn, my parents, and my husband. your most marked characteristic... I‘m really tall?