"I read up on the issues relevant to where I'm shooting and I ask questions wherever I go. What I learn along the way informs what and how I photograph. Content is very important to me. I want my work to be about something, something that I care strongly about. Now I always try to have at least some working concept or idea before embarking on a project, while also being open to what I discover along the way." - Karen Halverson
When Karen Halverson was a small child in Syracuse, New York, her mother loaded her and her siblings into a car and took them on an 8,000 mile, three-month trip around the American West. She experienced the thrill of the road. And, even at that early age, she saw how dramatically different the western landscape was from what she knew. She believes that epic trip affected her deeply.
Years later, she was living in New York City and working towards a Ph.D. in anthropology. But a camera she'd acquired offered a different path. She left academia behind and took to the city streets with her camera. But still, the West beckoned. In the early 1980s, she began traveling there regularly to photograph.
She is still awed by the vistas that the western landscape affords. Yet it is always the human presence on the land that stops her in her tracks. Although her engagement with the West continues, in recent years she has been exploring the natural and cultural landscape elsewhere, in New Orleans, Detroit, South Florida, and in the Northeast where she now lives.