Sometime in my second year of high school, I took my brother’s camera and bicycled to Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. I took some photographs. I came home and went into a closet in my brother’s room. He showed me how to develop film and make photographs in that closet. I made a picture of a statue that had one arm raised. It was not the greatest of photos, but I loved it. I put it in a small frame and placed it on my bureau.  Thus began my lifetime love affair with all things in photography.

I took a couple of film/photo classes in high school and made photographs often. I went to Providence College. In my second year I took two photography classes. Then came a very important moment, I was sitting in a Western Civilization class. The lecture was on the art of the 19th Century and early modernism. I left the lecture in total amazement.  Coming from a family in which art was not important, I never knew that art, art history and a language of art existed.  This lecture opened a whole new world to me. Visual language became a part of me that day.

I went on and took four photography classes the next year and began to take art history classes. In my senior year I decided to add studio art as a major with a concentration in photography to go with my social science degree. I stayed for a fifth year at Providence and graduated in 1980. My final exhibition was of nudes that you can see on this website.  I left school with a total love of photography and art. This love has lasted my whole life. Even as I went on to have a career as a teacher and school administrator in Providence, I continued photograph with passion.

As I went on I built photo labs wherever I lived. I get ideas in my head that I have to photograph. I do tend to think of the photographs in groups. It is like they are poems and each image is a line in the poem. Cape Cod for example is about the Light in January. All the photos were taken in the middle of the month on three day trips. There have been over twenty of them. The days are short and often cold and windy. But the sun is low in the sky and the colors are warm.  I have always loved examining the light.

I have spent many summers on Block Island. It is a second home. The island is many things to many people. Some go to party, others to beach it, some go for work, for some they go to be with family. These photographs are about why I go there. I go to find the peacefulness inside on the island. For many years I showed my work at Lazy Fish.

There are different works presented here. Some are in my head completed. Others are still being worked on.  I will be adding work as I get to it.

K.C. Perry