ABOUT THE ARTIST

Christina Fritsch first started taking photographs at the age of ten, when her parents handed her a Brownie. She continued her exploration of photography as a student at New York's Laguardia High School of Music and Art, and then at the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, where she studied under Laura McPhee, Barbara Bosworth, Nicholas Nixon and Abelardo Morell, and received her B.F.A. in 1989.

Many of Ms. Fritsch's most striking photographs are those treating themes of decay and transformation in the natural world. Working in both color and black and white, she seeks out overlooked aspects of the landscape; the crowded regeneration of the forest floor, the writhing undersides of felled trees, the play of light on the surface of a secluded brook. Often taken on rough and unsteady terrain, these pictures are all the more remarkable for the fact that most are hand-held exposures. In the darkroom, Fritsch eschews cropping and doctoring, preferring what she has called the "unclothed moment" of a full frame.

For much of the past ten years, Fritsch has devoted prodigious creative energy to recording the landscape on and about the Wonalancet River, a small mountain waterway in Tamworth, NH that descends from Mt. Chocorua. Unlike so many landscape photographs which proceed from an expansive overview of the subject similar to that of an "omniscient narrator" in a text, these compositions possess an unusual sense of still, intimate enclosure. Fritsch herself likes to refer to them as, "rooms out of doors," explaining, "I’ve walked the length of this river more times than I can count. Now, rather than thinking of it as a simple line from point A to point B, I see it as a sequence of linked chambers, each with its own moods, inhabitants and features to be explored." Fritsch prefers shooting early in the day, often in wet weather, and the resulting dense, crepuscular color saturation adds to her already ambiguous and discursive approach to what is normally a prosaic, representational idiom. Critic Mary Sherman underlined this quality in a recent review for the Boston Herald, stating of the Wonalancet images, "These lushly colored close-ups of landscapes are stunning portrayals of texture pushed to almost abstract extremes." In her more recent works, Fritsch has applied her signature style to bold re-visioning of such diverse landscapes as the coastal islands of Maine and the mysterious man-made vistas of Boston's "Big Dig."

Ms. Fritsch is the owner/proprietor of 3rd Eye Photo Services, a custom darkroom and digital imaging atelier catering to commercial and fine arts photographers. She makes her home in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, where she shares a converted horse barn with her husband, Kosta Demos, their daughter, Calliope, and their cat, Tertius.