Twenty Year Retrospective: Society of St. Anne, on view May 3 - June 28

Drawn to documentary photography with pictorial inclinations, Katherine Scherer’s point of view developed out of interests in the human experience as expressed through the lens of culture, history, and geography. With an understanding eye, her approach is to celebrate her subject with her signature humanistic approach. Katherine’s Society of St. Anne portfolio best exemplifies this. She was first introduced to the pageantry of this walking parade in 1998, while living in New Orleans. Unlike the more typical parades with floats as the main attraction, it is the costumed participants that are the raison d’être of this storied neighborhood tradition. Katherine photographed the Society of St. Anne Parade in black and white until 2005 with her trusty and precise Canon AE-1.

Beginning in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina, and as an unintentional metaphor to Wizard of Oz after the storm, she began photographing the parade in color with the Holga camera - a low-tech, less-controlled medium format camera prone to unintended side-effects. Unaware, at first, of how the hurricane manifested a photographic shift in her work, what was evident after Katrina was the want to capture - in vibrant color - a community’s resilience through the survival of the St. Anne celebration. Katherine’s recent work has upheld this notion.

Her 2018 and 2019 St. Anne portraits are a combination of precision and theater through new formats that expand into the digital darkroom without compromising her purist heart. Katherine Scherer’s work has been exhibited in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She has received two Louisiana Division of the Arts artist award grants and a Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation award. She has been an artist member of Baton Rouge Gallery – center for contemporary art since 2002 and will have a twenty-year retrospective of her Society of St. Anne work in May-June 2019 at the Hammond Regional Art Center.